(First-time poster here! @admins: “Feedback / Hardware” seems like the most applicable subforum - please feel free to relocate it if that’s not the best match.)
After months of wanting to run Haiku on a spare computer, but it not recognizing the built-in network adapters on my spare machine, i remembered that a 22±year-old USB2 10/100 ethernet adapter was laying around in my “random cables” box…
Haiku actually supports it! Unsurprisingly, the network is slow as molasses (right at 1mb/sec in the LAN, which was plenty fast back when i got that adapter) but it works. The OS, of course, is as snappy as ever.
The computer is a MediaForum GN34, a machine i’ve had for 4-5 years and absolutely love. i’ve had less success/more grief with the couple of other MediaForum models i’ve tried, but the GN34 is a solid box which idles at only a couple of watts.
The wifi device shows up in the network config but it has a MAC of 0, which a post i read earlier suggests means a driver limitation or compatibility issue. eth0, OTOH, does not show up at all:
“pegasus” is my ancient, but apparently reliable, USB2 10/100 ethernet adapter.
There’s another (much newer) USB ethernet adapter which is currently in use on another device, but Haiku can’t see that one, either. Edit: just tried that one, a combo USB hub/ethernet adapter, and listdev doesn’t see it up at all. Linux is listing it as a ethernet interface from vendor ASIX, product ID AX88179A.
i was thrilled to be able to move away from a VM onto real hardware, though, even if the download speeds are currently capped at a meg a second. Swapping between a Haiku VM and its Linux host plays painful havoc with my muscle memory because of Haiku’s practice of “swapping” the ctrl and alt in so many places. i understand that’s a divisive topic with a long history and won’t beat that dead horse here.
In case you don’t know,you can switch the CTRL and ALT keys in the Keymap preferences.
That can have some surprising side effects (combinations that worked like everywhere else before are now swapped),but for the big majority of shortcuts you get a Windows-like behaviour with it.
For USB devices in beta 5 you have to look in listusb instead of listdev. We have changed that in the current nightly builds so listdev now also includes USB devices.
For the built-in wired ethernet, this device should be handled by the rtl81xx driver. There have not been any changes to that one since beta5 and it is synchronized with FreeBSD 14. I assume some other part of the hardware is not compatible with the driver, and in that case, we should find some clues if you share the syslog (found in /boot/system/var/log/syslog).
Likewise for the wifi, the syslog may tell us what the driver is unhappy with.
Sidebar: also tons of “pegasus: ERROR read: bad frame size 1522” (“last message repeated 2872 times”…) for the working pegasus adapter, which may (he vaguely speculates) have something to do with its apparent speed of 10mbit instead of 100mbit, but i’m not truly not concerned about that adapter’s speed.
Interesting. Both drivers seem to fail quite early in the initialization. Either this is an unlikely case of two broken drivers, or there is a common cause.
In this case, maybe some problem with the PCI bus not working correctly, and all reads returning 0. I say that because these two should probably not be all zeros:
Unfortunately, debugging this without access to the machine would be pretty difficult. Unless there are some known problems with workarounds in other OS that we could copy in our driver for the PCI bus?
The “pegasus” driver itself is an old port of a driver from FreeBSD, but from before our FreeBSD compatibility layer gained support for USB devices. I should see about replacing it with a newer port. (And maybe also replacing our homegrown ASIX driver with the FreeBSD one, too…)
