After contacting Simon Wilson regarding his development efforts to port one of Haiku's drivers to the RISC OS platform, we threw him some questions about it. He promptly responded the next day, and here you have it. Read on, and enjoy.

Tell us a little about yourself, Simon.

I don't have much development time available in my spare time, but my full time job is writing drivers for hardware accelerators, so this is right up my avenue.

Why did you decide to use the Haiku driver?

I have been looking for an open-source 3D driver for nVidia cards for a while, and I came across this on a Google search. I was already familiar with the 2D portion of the Haiku driver as I had played with the backend scaler code (for overlays) a while ago.

What do you think of the Haiku project? Does it have a chance or is it just a pipe dream?

I would like to see more minority operating systems take the limelight away from Microsoft Windows, which is ubiquitous, but inferior in many areas. The Haiku project seems a very promising avenue and its future looks good. More competition between operating systems would inevitably drive quality up for end users.

Are there projects you are working on that anyone can contribute to?

I currently maintain an open-source RISC OS driver for PCI TV cards. In many ways the driver is cleaner than the Linux version of the driver, so it is a good candidate for contribution or porting. A few people so far have contributed assistance on that project, and help is always appreciated.

How complicated is Mesa? What is the relationship between your work, MESA, and graphics drivers in general?

Mesa is an extremely comprehensive package, however, it has a very clear interface to the driver it runs on top of, requiring no modification of the Mesa source itself. This makes the task of driver writing and porting even easier. I hope that the transistion to 6.x versions of Mesa for the Haiku project goes smoothly. I have used early software-only versions of Mesa in the past, so I was fairly familiar with the code.

Do you plan on installing Haiku/BeOS for yourself, and using it more or less than RISC OS? Why?

I have used BeOS in the past and was impressed, although back then it supported only a limited number of hardware devices. I would be very interested in installing Haiku's OS in the future. I have been using RISC OS and its predecessors since the 80s and it has always been my primary OS. I find RISC OS to be a comfortable and rewarding operating system - probably the same reasons people love BeOS.

Thanks for taking the time with us. We wish you success with your development work, and hope one day you'll spend a little time with Haiku. :D

My pleasure!