Haiku Shows PCI Improvements.
May 14, 2005 16:38 UTC, by Chris Simmons, Senior Journalist
From the mind-rattling department...

Eek. This was actually posted a few days ago but I'm just now noticing it. (Sorry, I'm slipping, as I continue to work on our commenting system. Forgive me. :)
 
Axel Dörfler posted on the Haiku OS website that the PCI architecture of Haiku is further along and ready for general use. I'll let him explain more:
 
While the PCI bus manager is working nicely for quite some time now, and PCI IDE drivers were already collecting dust in our repository, too, it was not possible to use them due to a lack of integration of the new driver architecture the PCI IDE drivers are based on.
 
The integration and rework of the driver architecture is still not completed, but it's now mature enough to actually use Thomas Kurschel's PCI IDE driver system, which worked fine on first try (which is not too surprising, as it is being used in Zeta as well, and was already intensively tested on R5 before).
 
As a side effect, this also means we're now accessing hard drives in DMA mode when supported. SATA host adapters are not yet supported, but at least hard drives beyond 128 GB are working.
 
I am not sure if Thomas's latest driver is now part of the Haiku repository or if the one Haiku is using is the version posted at BeBits. I do know that Thomas has done extensive work to that driver in the past few months, and is reportedly faster and more stable. These questions I will try to get answers to when I email him about it.
 
With the latest news about the app_server progress, actual 3D hardware support through Rudolf's nVidia driver, and now more PCI progress, Haiku has made some leaps and bounds in progress this year, and we are not even at June yet! Keeping things in perspective, individually these are small (but important and well deserved) achievements, but we all know there is far much more work to be done.
 
Thankfully we have some great developers working for us! Good work everyone!