[haiku-development] Re: What's the status of Haiku?
- From: "A. D. Sharpe" <demetrioussharpe@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 03:49:50 -0600
On 8/25/2014 3:27 AM, Stephan Aßmus wrote:
Hi Demetrious,
I think you are blowing things out of proportion quite a bit and spreading FUD
in the process. If you look a bit more at the details, you might come to a much
more balanced understanding.
Hey, it's definitely not been FUD. Time will tell, though.
The Haiku kernel has a lot of components and a lot of aspects.
But take the network driver situation as an example. A FreeBSD source
compatibility layer was developed, so that we can use all the FreeBSD network
drivers. Some of the native drivers have been superseded by that, but looking
even more closely, those had sometimes been ports of the FreeBSD driver in the
first place.
Which is exactly how some of the original BeOS drivers were written. But
you'll notice that they still didn't use anyone else's kernel.
What is the plan for getting 3D hardware acceleration into Haiku? It seems by
writing more compatibility layers so that Linux drivers can be compiled for
Haiku. Of course this is a huge undertaking and while multiple people have
started it, no one has gotten results yet...
How does this match up with R1? Before R1 is feature complete, how does
this even matter? I seem to recall that this wasn't even a necessary
feature in the beginning.
Native graphics drivers are written by taking guidance and sometimes trying to
sync parts of them with FreeBSD or Linux drivers. Same for some native audio
drivers. We even have a port of Open Sound which sometimes has to be used to
get sound on certain hardware.
Take the Haiku multi-media add-ons. There were a few written, but most were
actually wrappers to third party libraries. Where there were native plugins,
they were inferior to FFmpeg. In the end, I poured more work into the FFmpeg
plugin and basically replaced every other plugin that we originally had for
Haiku by the one FFmpeg plugin.
There is of course more to the kernel than just drivers. The VM layer and VFS
would be most prominent. But ask any of our kernel developers and they will all
agree that the speed and scalability of the Linux or FreeBSD kernel are in
another league - and they would love for the Haiku kernel to play in the same!
The code of the Haiku kernel might be much nicer and more approachable to new
comers. But in terms of actual technical features, there isn’t actually a whole
lot which makes the kernel special or even very different from the Linux or
FreeBSD kernel.
Now, in 2001, both Linux and FreeBSD still had the giant kernel lock. They
didn’t have as much hardware support as they have now. They were probably even
more ugly to dig into. Maybe they didn’t have some primitives that they have
now which would have made implementing ports more difficult than now...
Any lastly: If there was a true danger of people leaving the project if the
Linux kernel would be seriously considered - why have most Haiku developers
reacted at least interested in this thread? This would be just a parallel
project for now, nothing is interrupted. Once it can be tried and tested, we
can evaluate the question whether to absorb it. I don’t think the involved
people would decide for something which is ultimately bad for the project or
comes with too many compromises.
Time will tell. But I will tell you this -there's absolutely nothing
wrong with sticking with the kernel that was worked on from the very
beginning. I think a lot of you guys are being blinded by things that
you don't yet have but aren't actually necessary for the feature
completeness that you were originally going for. In this case, the
interest seems to be in throwing away hard work that was carefully
crafted from the very early days just to get features that don't bring
the project any closer to having R1. But, do as you will. If you aren't
going to stand up for the work that has already been done, then I guess
I shouldn't do it either.
--
Regards,
A. D. Sharpe, Sr.
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