[haiku-development] Re: What's the status of Haiku?
- From: Julian Harnath <julian.harnath@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 18:39:55 +0200
Hello all,
Ingo Weinhold <ingo_weinhold@xxxxxx> schrieb:
> Unless I miss someone, of the Haiku developers (counting committers
> only) who posted in this thread no one strictly opposed the idea of
> switching to another kernel and most even seem to consider this an
> interesting option.
To be honest, I'm a bit disheartened by how many core contributors are
expressing their complete willingness to replace our kernel with Linux
(given that someone tackles the difficult work of pulling off such a
switch).
If it was at least some kind of modern, interesting kernel... then I
could be persuaded to join the train, but with an archaic (design-wise)
kernel like Linux... it really isn't convincing to me. I once had the
'joy' of working myself deep into a few parts of the Linux kernel
sources, and what I saw was certainly not pretty. Working inside the
Haiku kernel was a great experience in comparison!
So, suppose for a moment we pulled it off and switched to the Linux
kernel, maybe with Wayland for graphics on top. Great, so many drivers!
What about integration though? One of the key benefits of BeOS/Haiku
is, to me, the tight integration of system parts, from the lowest to
the highest layers. Parts know about one another, talk with one
another, react to changes in one another. Lack of that kind of
integration is IMO the biggest problem that has held back Linux as a
desktop OS the past 15 years.
Could we provide the same kind of integration with a stack like
Linux+Wayland underneath? And even if we can, we'd give up control over
large amounts of the system to external entities. Maintaining a fork of
Linux was not feasible back when Haiku started, and it still isn't
feasible now. We would have to follow any kind of deep, big changes
done to the Linux kernel, whether we want to or not. Same is true for
Wayland, and possibly more components which all that would bring with
it. We will not be the masters of what Haiku is anymore.
In the past few months, whenever free time and motivation permitted, I
have been working on this NFSv2/v3 file system driver for our kernel. I
also had plans to do some more kernel work in the future. Now, I have
to wonder.. is it really worth to continue on those things, if many
Haiku devs already dream of a future without this kernel anyway? I
know, nothing is being decided, I'm aware of that, but free time is
limited and I don't want to spend it on something that will probably be
completely dropped in the next few years anyway...
Well, just my 2 cents.
--
So long, Julian
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