Windows 10 on Intel Compute Stick runs really slow and Win10 is also going to be out of support soon.
Compute Stick being a old hardware is a perfect candidate for Haiku for me. So, I tried nightly build hrev59024 of Haiku on it. It booted nicely and runs without any lag as Haiku does and that is why I love it so much.
But Haiku cannot see Wifi and the built in EMMC storage. So, I cannot install it on Compute Stick and use it.
I searched youtube and found Action Retro recently had the same experience:
Please see from time: 7:17 - 8:33
As you may know it has Intel Atom-x5 Cherry Trail Z-83xx with the model number being BOXSTK1AW32SCL.
I don’t see it in Haiku’s supported hardware list
Is there any plan/chance to support it in the near future?
Access to the hardware for testing (I don’t own any eMMC device for example)
Knowledge on how to write drivers
I’m trying to solve 3 by improving documentation, but 1 gets in the way. Until it’s like that there’s no need for me to try 2 (getting more hardware).
Intel Compute Stick can run Debian and detect Wifi. I have not checked eMMC, though. I will try to install a linux on it since Haiku does not work at the moment.
don’t see why? if debian manages to support a device then that device can be used with free drivers, we can try to port to such a device aswell. I’d be more concerned if only windows runs somewhere
He could have installed it onto another USB stick instead of emmc or SD and it would have worked fine. But he had wifi - why don’t you? Do they have multiple wifi chipsets in these things? Maybe you can swap them then?
Are you sure it’s eMMC? The Wikipedia page for the Acer Aspire One does not list any model using eMMC. Or a 32GB drive, even. The only one I can find that appears to use eMMC is the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook, and that does not look like the model you have in your video. It is a 14 inch “chromebook” machine.
You can easily check that in DriveSetup or listing disks in /dev. If your disk appears in /dev/disk/mmc, it may be an eMMC device. That would be extremely surprising, since no one has written a driver for that (I have written parts of the SDHC stack, but only for SD cards, eMMC is slightly different, and even then, the driver is still unfinished and unreliable).
eMMC uses a completely different way to interface with the computer (similar to SD cards, completely different from SATA, IDE and NVME), which requires specific drivers. No amount of BIOS can solve that. I would bet your internal drive uses SATA, even if they made it non replaceable and soldered in to the motherboard.
Writing a driver for eMMC should not be very hard, starting from the work I did for SD cards and SDHCI interfaces already.
Here’s a roadmap:
Fix the SDHCI driver to use condition variables instead of semaphores for synchronizing between interrupts and main code, the semaphores are a mess and lead to deadlocks
Test the SDHCI hardware on more host controllers, like USB, SDHCI is a standard with several implementations, we should get it more stable
Reconsider how to support multiple devices on the same SD/MMC bus. In theoryt SDHCI supports this, but many controllers seem to be confused when we try to do it. Maybe keep support in the driver, but enable it only on controllers where it has been tested successfully (and where it’s needed, as 99% of usages will be with a single SD card or eMMC chip connected to the controller anyway)
Study the eMMC specification, compare with the SD specification, implement the needed commands in the mmc_disk driver
If you have someone who knows how to write drivers, and access to the hardware for testing, this is maybe a week of work, possibly less if things go smoothly. So, just find a way to get a Haiku driver developper in a room with an eMMC device and no distractions for a week, and you should have a driver in the end.
It’s what I was told at the time. “It works like an SSD, but it’s actually a soldered-on SD card, which is much, much slower”. This was way back when SSDs were seriously expensive kit.
I’d have to dig it up out of my e-waste collection, and it most likely has FreeDOS on it now, sorry.
Anyway, my memory of it may be wrong. You get old enough, it happens. Feel free to delete my original comment.
I don’t have any idea why wifi is not working on my device.
I checked both 32 bit and 64 bit haiku again.
Sound, wifi and emmc are not working.
Haiku can detect wifi device, but shows no wireless network found. I have wireless network available.
Please see attached images.
