@PulkoMandy
Okay, thanks for sharing. It definitely felt like it was somewhat extraneous, it was just a little unclear to me what was going on there.
Is it actually necessary to have proper “hotplug” detection (for PC Card or CardBus)? Or would it suffice to do some kind of hardware probing once at boot time to see what’s connected at startup?
That’s not to say that it wouldn’t be wise to exercise a bit more caution in accessing it, since it could technically be removed later. But I feel like hot-plugging support (on the software end) is isn’t strictly essential?
Has anyone even tried adding any ExpressCard (EC) support?
I know it was somewhat niche, uncommon, and short-lived by comparison to regular PC Card/CardBus, but there is at least 64-bit hardware with support for 6-8 GB+ of ram that had ExpressCard slots.
Personally,I think it’s kind of a shame (in a neutral and objective sense – not blaming you guys) that Haiku doesn’t support hardware that’s still fairly common at least as far as availability and which Linux actually supports pretty well for the most part on capable hardware.
I would love to see it have at least some basic support, at least to the extent of being able to use basic storage media (ATA Flash, CF->ATA adapters, etc) and some network adapters (especially 10/100 Ethernet devices, but a lot of people have previously expressed some interest in WiFi adapters).
Obviously I’m not too concerned about other PCMCIA hardware like: Memory/SRAM, 56k Modems/Fax Modem, Serial or Parallel port cards, TV tuners, MPEG decoders, etc.
I should be clear that I wouldn’t mind working on this myself, as I can program in C and muddle along in C++. But it would be necessary for me to properly set up a machine for Haiku development first.
I’ve got a bunch of old laptops (most somewhere between really old and merely outdated ala 1st/2nd generation Intel Core i3/i5) and some PC Card/CardBus stuff kicking around. Not sure if any of it will run Haiku nicely off LiveCD/LiveDVD media, but I could test that out.