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.

1 Like
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.

2 Likes
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.

1 Like
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