Haiku OS Hopes For New 3D Stack

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Haiku OS Hopes For New 3D Stack

Haiku OS, the nine year old project to develop an open-source BeOS-compatible operating system, is hoping it will receive a new OpenGL stack this year. The Haiku project, like X.Org, will be participating in this year's Google Summer of Code project where the search engine giant pays many student developers to work on code for various open-source projects. There's a long list of ideas for where Haiku OS could use some help, and one of them includes a hardware 3D acceleration stack...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODA1NQ

[cb88]

@Micheal This is a bit misleading as gallium itself is fully working using software raster the only it isn't merely partly ported

The part that is lacking is porting of the hardware driver.

Also it wouldn't be a *new* OpenGL stack it would be the same one with hardware support. in fact haiku alpha1 has mesa 7.4.x iirc which was just before the gallium switch... and mesa-git should work now I think. It hasn't been packaged up afaik though.

most of the opengl commits are by aljen so you could search for him in the haiku trac and find out lots of info just an fyi.

I will also point out that haiku now has a native webkit browser with supposedly sub 1 sec startup (I haven't tried myself yet) that is definitly worth investigating once released as stable most of the work at them moment being done on the browser is by stippi who has been hired by haiku inc to do just that.

[philcostin]

I would love to have a go at porting nouveau to Haiku and I can see all the components coming into place to make it possible.

However, I am extremely pressed for time which means that however much I want to do it, however possible it is right now I am sure someone else with more time and even more enthusiasm than I have will jump on it within days. If they do, they have my backing. If they don't, I'm preliminarily interested in doing it if I ever find some free time to allocate to that.

[Zenja]

Funny coincidence. I'm actually porting the Nouveau driver to Haiku. I'm going via the route of creating a Linux driver compatibility layer, so that the Linux driver can be used unmodified. At the moment, I've got DRM and the Haiku base driver done, but with stubbed out memory functions. I'm slowly wrapping the Linux memory functions to Haiku. When done, any Linux video driver should also work. I expect to finish in 6-8 weeks.

[cb88]

Funny coincidence. I'm actually porting the Nouveau driver to Haiku. I'm going via the route of creating a Linux driver compatibility layer, so that the Linux driver can be used unmodified. At the moment, I've got DRM and the Haiku base driver done, but with stubbed out memory functions. I'm slowly wrapping the Linux memory functions to Haiku. When done, any Linux video driver should also work. I expect to finish in 6-8 weeks.

Thats pretty awesome... so you also have to wrap the winsys code right? From my point of view that would be quite a feat. I don't think you could reused the stuff from mesa as you said any linux video driver would work and that should include the proprietary blobs which aren't based on mesa

[Dragonlord]

I'd love to see a fully working accelerated 3D stack in Haiku. It's the only thing preventing my engine to run native on Haiku. Only question is if the stack alone helps if the drivers of the big graphic card manufacturers are missing. Stack alone after all won't get you running.

[philcostin]

Funny coincidence. I'm actually porting the Nouveau driver to Haiku. I'm going via the route of creating a Linux driver compatibility layer, so that the Linux driver can be used unmodified. At the moment, I've got DRM and the Haiku base driver done, but with stubbed out memory functions. I'm slowly wrapping the Linux memory functions to Haiku. When done, any Linux video driver should also work. I expect to finish in 6-8 weeks.

Excellent! My only advice then if you're doing it that way is to watch out for license cross-contamination - but I'm sure you have that covered. Most of the code is MIT licensed in both projects anyway.

[bridgman]

I'd love to see a fully working accelerated 3D stack in Haiku. It's the only thing preventing my engine to run native on Haiku. Only question is if the stack alone helps if the drivers of the big graphic card manufacturers are missing. Stack alone after all won't get you running.

I always think of "the graphics stack" as including drivers, not sure if everyone feels the same way.

[intgr]

There's also another interesting idea and that's the ability to allow the Haiku kernel to run as a user-land process on top of itself, like a virtual kernel and somewhat similar to what's possible with DragonflyBSD

Is that like User Mode Linux? Hardly anyone is using it these days, although I'm not quite sure why.

[Dragonlord]

I always think of "the graphics stack" as including drivers, not sure if everyone feels the same way.

Not in the case of Haiku. The 3D stack has been around since quite some time but the drivers. All the way back to BeOS had a working (and fast) 3D stack but the drivers got stuck around the time BeOS went out for lunch. Hence my question in that case since some people had 3D acceleration working in Haiku but only if they had old enough 3D cards.