Preferences idea

Would it be a good idea to include “black listing” of drivers in a GUI preflet? I mean adding blacklisting manually isn’t really user friendly. Maybe third party option package?

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Maybe we should fix drivers so that blacklisting is not needed?

I’m aware of two cases:

  • The hda driver when using opensound. We should finish the work on these so that the opensound driver takes precedence over the hda one. Or fix the hda driver.
  • The intel_extreme driver which attempts to drive video cards it thinks it can, but then fails to get them working. We should disable this driver for the device IDs it isn’t actually compatible with (but that may lead to about as much people complaining they only get VESA when it was working fine before), or fix the driver.

Are there other drivers creating similar problems?

I would do more driver development, maybe, if I was not still mostly single responsible for all things more or less related to WebKit…

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It make no sense then you does not can start the system without blacklisting. You can set hardware to blacklist starting up haiku. Press space bar during startup and look for the blacklist option

I agree here, for most of us it’s fairly simple to blacklist a driver, maybe something could be written in Yab to create the file “packages” in /system/settings to blacklist a driver? Hitting space on boot every time is not really comfortable for the end user (and maybe yes, if the drivers got updated it would clear the problem, but we’re not there yet) :slight_smile:

There’s ticket #13962 “Add a cli tool to ease blacklisting” that may be a compromise between usability and the fact that it’s a poweruser feature. A whole new preference panel seems a bit much.

OTOH, if we had a “Session Management” preference panel, it could be integrated there as it feels a bit related. In SM, one could roll back package installations and updates (like in the boot options) and make those old states permanent (one thing I currently miss if an update borked the system).
The panel could control the launch_deamon, too.
One could configure what system states to save on shutdown (Tracker windows, all running apps or just some apps, etc.). This fine-grained deep session management isn’t implemented yet, of course. :slight_smile:

Just thinking out loud from the top of my head…

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The proper place to integrate it could be Devices (for drivers, at least), and probably not by using the blacklist system, but having a list of available drivers for a given device and picking one (which would then generate a settings file for the device manager, probably)

The blacklist system, even if you throw a gui on it, would still be inconvenient, because you still have to know which file to blacklist. Being able to do it in a GUI or CLI tool is only a very small improvement from the current situation. It seems not worth the effort.

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