Porting Drivers

Feedback Hardware
42

I never understood why lnux needs initramfs. It feels like a terrible hack and as an unnecessary complication.

43

linux doesn’t. Linux distros do.

They use it for stuff like booting with a passwird protected disk, loadung drivers for the kernel etc.

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44

Yes, in fact in earlier times most distributions did not use one. In debian it’s optional. It’s mostly about flexibility: For things like encrypted filesystems, software raid, the huge number of device drivers, filesystems, disk controllers etc that Linux supports, and the requirement to run on very low memory systems in some cases. You can boot without one if your kernel has all the drivers required to mount the root fs already, but if you build a kernel with all possible ways to mount a root fs then you end up with a lot of unused driver code in memory.

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45

If anyone have interest of the source of a USB to LAN (RJ45) adapter for Linux to try porting to haiku, let me know.

46

Dear @Nephele,

I found the following – searched the net for your question …

Google << “blessed disk? What exactly does the command do?”

47

It marks disks bootable on Mac machines.

48

No it doesn’t, it preconfigures drivers for specific macos versions.

Making the disk bootable is just following the efi spec.

49

I finally got my Mac working again. Anyway, it’s been a while. Is there some list of supported hardware?

I use this, but I don’t know how up to date it is. But whoever works on the drivers, is there a list of devices that are in that driver? Regardless if it’s tested to work or not. I thought I saw something like that in the developer page, but can’t find it.

I think my wireless card is a Broadcom 4331. I read somewhere else at the time that Haiku used FreeBSD drivers for wireless cards. They support it as far as I can tell, but I have not tested it. I know it does not work with my Mac at the moment. I did update Haiku.

50

And almost certainly never will. It’s been discussed many times in the forum, you’d better get a supported Wi-Fi USB card like the TP-LINK N150 Nano (TL-WN725N). It’s €6,99 including shipping with Amazon Prime in Italy so I suppose the price will be similar in other countries, just to give you an idea.

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51

I have a usb dongle. It’s ok, low profile. Takes up on if my USB ports though. So if I’m using my mouse and wifi, I can’t use my usb drive.

But I would assume this is applicable to more than just me. If Haiku uses FreeBSD drivers, with some sort of wrapper to be used, it would benefit a lot of users. Expansive hardware support I think is pretty important.

Edit: I saw the previous post now about FreeBSD drivers. Seems kind of beyond me to do anything with it though. Someone else should do all the work. :wink:

Edit 2: I found this from a previous comment. I’m not a developer though, or maybe I’m missing something and didn’t read far enough.

52

The BCM43xx encompasses a huge amount of devices, yours is not supported by bwi but more likely by bwn which is not available in Haiku, AFAICT.
There must be a magic combination of a developer with this specific hardware with enough motivation to write a driver for it, this is unlikely after all those years.
Ultimately, this specific Wi-Fi chipset reportedly has some issues on other *BSD flavours and some Linux kernels, too. I strongly believe it’s a dead end.
I’m telling you this as an owner of various Apple computers on which I’ve run Haiku for a long time.
I’d suggest getting a USB hub or a solution like the Logitech Unified Receiver that drives a mouse and a keyboard altogether with one USB dongle (selected devices also from Logitech, of course). This is the solution I currently use also on my Thinkpad because I can attach two receivers to two different computers (the Thinkpad with Haiku and a MacBook Pro) and switch between the two.

53

Some links about BCM4331 support on FreeBSD:

Sorry,but I think trying to get this to work is wasted time.
Broadcom Wifi devices are more or less as open as Nvidia GPUs,they just don’t want this shit to work on anything but Windows and maybe Linux,and so they make it as hard as possible.

2 Likes
54

Note: This is for BeOS

Hi. I have a Mac clone with BeOS PowerPC running on it. The supported video cards list is very limited. There are a couple of graphics cards that work with the x86 version of BeOS and classic Mac, but not PPC BeOS. How involved would it be and how how hard would it be to port the ATI driver for a couple of devices for PowerPC BeOS? (Like Rage 128 or a Radeon 7/8/9xxx card?

Currently supported:
Built in graphics (3D Rage II)
ixMicro TwinTurbo 128/M2/4/8
ATi Xclaim GA
Matrox Millennium and Millenium II

55

Haiku doesn’t have a Rage128 driver; and the PCI stack on BeOS/PPC is not really feature complete; so I suspect that porting the Radeon driver - which does support the early PCI Radeon cards, and may even still have the BeOS-era 2D acceleration code in it - would not be easy.

You’d need a Mac compatible / Mac-flashed version of a Radeon to begin with, for MacOS to use it during the boot procedure and obviously the BeOS driver was never written for these versions to begin with.

edit: Haiku does actually have a basic Mach64/Rage/Rage128 driver; but I don’t know if it ever had acceleration. Haiku does not use 2D acceleration; but this would probably be something you’d really need on a machine of that era of performance.

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56

I do have a Mac Rage 128 GL, and a working BeOS. I will take a look at the stub driver they have when I get a chance. Is that the best place to start?

57

Sorry, carrying on with the PowerPC stuff…. Was it the Rage that was in a lot of the G3 line? I wonder if getting a driver for that would help with emulation? The Dingus PPC emulates various models and I guess they will probably emulate something like that for the boards that don’t have onboard graphics. I forget which cards they plan to support.

I do own physical old world G3 hardware. But nothing only my Wallsteet still boots. My beige desktop died.

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58

Ha. You want a parts G3? I have a couple and I don’t really use them. But I did pull the Rage card from one of the beige desktops.

Anytime I want to use an old Mac for MacOS, I like to use the G4 iMac. Too bad I can’t have BeOS or Haiku on it.

59

Thank you for the kind offer. I’m in the UK and I guess unless you are too the shipping costs would be more than the hardware is worth.

I need an 7300 or an 8500 really. My 9500 died and I would likr to use the processor card in a new motherboard (assuming it works still).

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