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Haiku Gains Support For Current Radeon HD Cards

Posted by timothy on from the old-and-new-together dept.

As reported by Phoronix, the Haiku operating system "has added (untested) support for the newest AMD Radeon graphics cards to its open-source driver for the BeOS-compatible operating system." (Specifically, that support is for the "Mullins" and "Hawaii" graphics processors.) Impressive that this project keeps the BeOS flag raised and continues to modernize; Haiku has been around since 2001 — years longer than Be, Inc. itself lasted.

70 comments

  1. untested by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Not to take anything away from the folks working on Haiku, and not that I would ever accuse Phoronix of jumping the gun on a story *cough*, but I really don't think you can claim support for new hardware before someone has tried running the code.

  2. And boy am I excited! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Not really.

  3. Who knows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    After MS-DOS, Mac OS, Windows, OS X, Linux, BSD... maybe we'll need Haiku in less than a decade.

    1. Re:Who knows by rudy_wayne · · Score: 4, Funny

      I have to give them credit. Haiku is even more irrelevant than BeOS.

      That's not easy to do.

    2. Re:Who knows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Amiga OS4 begs to differ !

    3. Re:Who knows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It's a shame too, because BeOS was doing things that even modern OSes still can't do. I remember being able to run twenty or more video at the same time without lag or do in place driver updates without interrupting anything or requiring a reboot, all on a Pentium III 450MHz.

    4. Re:Who knows by jones_supa · · Score: 2

      What made this difference? Was there something magical about the scheduler and/or the graphics stack?

    5. Re:Who knows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It was just better made. From the very beginning it was intended to be able to handle such things. Did you know that there was no such thing as an hourglass cursor in BeOS because the system was never in a state where the user could not interact with it?

      All of the OSes that we use today are hodgepodges. Crap built upon crap. Not BeOS.

    6. Re:Who knows by jones_supa · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Indeed. Man, a frame-accurate, fully responsive, low-latency OS would be a dream. Today we have various CPU schedulers, I/O schedulers, multiple CPU cores and SSDs thrown at it, but the results are still often quite subpar.

    7. Re:Who knows by fizzer06 · · Score: 1

      I saw a demo at the Dallas Infomart back in the day. Like you said, it was able to display several videos without any choppiness. No other OS I had seen could come close. I suspect that Haiku can't come close either.

    8. Re:Who knows by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      IIRC a lot of the OS I/O stack was coded in ASM to squeeze every drop of performance out. To see what a difference being coded in ASM you should try Kolibri sometime, a full OS with networking that fits on a single floppy,just crazy what you can do by going bare metal.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    9. Re:Who knows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is quite impressive how all of those who have tried to modernized AmigaOS have failed at providing something better than the 3.1-distribution.
      Really, how hard is it to add a 64bit filesystem without having to bloat up everything else?

    10. Re:Who knows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If we want a similar feeling we will have to start to treat user interaction as realtime-critical. Not only is it necessary to fetch user input in a timely fashion, lost input events is non-acceptable bug, but it is also vital that any GUI or console output is processed at a higher priority than any generic calculation. Even network packetloss is preferable to unresponsiveness.
      A situation where a process hogs the CPU so much that opening a console and killing it takes several seconds should never occur.

      Also, if the start-time of a program is so long that it can have a splash-screen it is still in beta.
      There is no reason for that. You don't need to load a gazillion small files, you don't need to initialize a bunch of data.
      Everything can be cached and much can be loaded in the background.

      Modern systems shouldn't have a worse response time than systems from the 90's.

    11. Re:Who knows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The GUI framework was very aggressively multithreaded, at least - merely making sure that it's hard to do IO or calculations in the UI thread goes a long way. The scheduler was also optimized for desktop interactivity, whatever that implies; I guess they tried to get high-priority tasks (like UI threads) as low latency as possible, even at the detriment of everything else?

    12. Re:Who knows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I was also a bit disappointed that QNX was never pushed more as a desktop OS. I remember both the QNX 1.44MB floppy demo, with full GUI, basic applications and web browser, along with the later full desktop version on CD. That could certainly have been a nice operating system for more than just industrial and embedded needs.

    13. Re:Who knows by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      The GUI toolkit made aggressive use of threading. This was good for latency, but not great for throughput because you ended up doing a lot of context switching. It was also quite hard to program, because you had to be very careful about synchonisation.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    14. Re:Who knows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I agree.

      And the really sad thing is that "everything" in haiku almost works. My wifi nic driver almost works. So I can't connect to the internet. The SMP support almost works. So I can't actually use my latest chip set without going into uniprocessor mode. My radeon hd card almost works. So it doesn't display stuff, unless I use a 2 year old graphics card.

      I was a huge BeOS fan and was hoping Haiku would bring a modernized version to the market. Alas, they target the hopelessly dated R5 and never seem to get ahead of the hardware innovation curve.

      The days of hobbyist OS's are unfortunately numbered.

    15. Re:Who knows by Rhys · · Score: 1

      I'm going to go with something on the theory that after being put on a PC (single chip, with a large L2 cache) it got a free pass to do what it damn well pleased, since it'd been designed to run on a much slower multi-chip PPC solution, which gave up L2 cache entirely in order to have the second processor.

      --
      Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
    16. Re:Who knows by Lawrence_Bird · · Score: 1

      Indeed - if anything, BSD's do much of what they claim in their FAQ that Linux does not.

      At this point, it is hard to envision any OS displacing Windows/OSX/BSD/Linux without providing a radically different approach that allows users to do things not possible before

    17. Re:Who knows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's true that there was no hourglass cursor. It's just not true that it was never in a state that needed one.

      That's BeOS all over really. Horrible problems? Just paper over the cracks and tell the fans to cheer louder so nobody will hear about them.

      For example, they never got their filesystem to handle delete properly. So they provided a special tool called "forcerm" that would work when ordinary deletion mysteriously didn't work properly. You'd lose some disk space, but never mind right?

      Haiku people learned from the hourglass example. Rather than ship a working file system check they'd just tell newbies Haiku was so advanced it didn't need one. When sooner or later the filesystem was corrupted, they'd say well we did warn you it wasn't finished yet...

    18. Re:Who knows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Funny, because every BeOS developer I have ever talked to has said the opposite, that BeOS is a joy to code in.

      And I can tell you right now that throughput was no problem. I ran Quake II, used Gobe Productive and have done realtime video editing without any throughput issues. In fact, BeOS is still used in a number of professional studios, specifically for video and audio editing.

      Basically, you don't have a clue. You're talking about something you have never even used.

    19. Re:Who knows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I suspect that Haiku can't come close either.

      It doesn't. While Haiku can run BeOS apps, it doesn't come close to the speed and responsiveness of the real BeOS.

    20. Re:Who knows by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Funny, because every BeOS developer I have ever talked to has said the opposite, that BeOS is a joy to code in.

      Steve Jobs wasn't the only reason Apple decided to buy NeXT for ten times what Be was asking. The BeOS APIs were easy to use to write simple applications, but they had a sudden difficulty cliff. Your GUI application was a distributed system and most of the time this was fine because the parts were independent and events arrived at low enough rates that the user wouldn't notice if they were handled in the wrong order. Once you started getting complex MVC applications, the synchronisation requirements became painful and non-obvious. In contrast, the OpenStep APIs (rebranded by Apple as Cocoa) encouraged doing everything on the main thread, which increased latency for the UI but provided a much simpler programmer model because everything happened synchronously, unless you explicitly spawned a background thread for some long-running task.

      And I can tell you right now that throughput was no problem. I ran Quake II, used Gobe Productive and have done realtime video editing without any throughput issues. In fact, BeOS is still used in a number of professional studios, specifically for video and audio editing.

      You're arguing that throughput isn't a problem by listing a load of latency-sensitive applications?

      Basically, you don't have a clue. You're talking about something you have never even used.

      I remember BeOS 5 well. I remember the TCP/IP stack that could just about manage 30 minutes of consecutive uptime on a good day (good thing it was a microkernel and you could restart the network stack). I remember that the sound subsystem crashed at least once a day. I remember applications suddenly hitting race conditions under load and exhibiting very strange behaviour.

      I also fondly remember BFS and the tracker, but I don't have such a rose-tinted view of the system as some people.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    21. Re:Who knows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Confirmed. You never used it, you're talking out of your ass.

      Nice try, junior.

  4. Haiku hauku by hawk · · Score: 3, Funny

    Beos fails to sel
    Asks too much for Apple sale
    now just open source

    1. Re:Haiku hauku by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Beos fails to sel

      Too many syllables. Fail.

    2. Re:Haiku hauku by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Another angry AC on the run.

    3. Re:Haiku hauku by hawk · · Score: 1

      You can't count to five!
      So then why do i bother?
      Best your name not known . . .

      hawk

  5. No acceleration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Remember, no graphics (not "No modern Radeon HD graphics" or even "No Radeon graphics" but no graphics at all) in Haiku are hardware accelerated.

    The ONLY acceleration they offer at all is YCbCr scalable overlays for video on old chipsets that still did that sort of thing, which obviously Radeon HD does not. No 3D, no compositing, no blit operations, everything is done in RAM and then the whole frame is copied to the framebuffer.

    Of course today's CPUs are really fast. So long as you do simple 2D graphics or you have a really poky high-end CPU, Haiku can make this look pretty good despite not using virtually any of the transistors on your $200 graphics card.

    1. Re:No acceleration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How can a CPU be high end and poky at the same time?

    2. Re:No acceleration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When it's relied upon to do things that integrated hardware can do better, when properly drivered.

    3. Re:No acceleration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      doesnt matter, theres only 4 programs, and an AVI player or notepad doesnt need it anyway

    4. Re:No acceleration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Of course today's CPUs are really fast. So long as you do simple 2D graphics or you have a really poky high-end CPU, Haiku can make this look pretty good despite not using virtually any of the transistors on your $200 graphics card.

      Yes, and as a hardware enthusiast and designer, as well as an alternate OS, language, and game developer myself I can tell you that this is the correct and right way to do business. Here's the thing: Heterogeneous Computing. All throughout history you will find the specialized become generalized. From mechanical adding machines and pinball games (one application per box), to programmable arcade cabinets and machines running a single program (hint: BASIC is an application), to multiple games per cabinet and multiple programs per machine, to home consoles with many

      Smaller, faster, more general purpose is the trend. GPUs are just a hack because CPU designs aren't multi-threaded enough. This will change. The benefit is too great. The bottleneck from main RAM to Discrete RAM is too restrictive. Working around such pipelines is foolish, but it is the kludge that works for now. In the future your statements will be irrelevant. A "graphics card" will return to doing the minimal amount of work it must to put things on the screen because that is the correct and proper order.

      Segmented programming models are a hacky way to do graphics, and much slower than shared memory architectures. Shaders allowed us a little more general purpose access to the GPU, and thus we won back SOME of the creativity and flexibility we had given up for the speed of specialized hardware. There is a law of diminishing returns with such specializations, and as they become general enough we will run more general purpose code therein. See also: CUDA, OpenCL, etc. The fact that your C standard library isn't leveraging the computation power of the GPU is wasteful. Loop unrolling and vectorization optimizations for CPU code are paltry benefits compared to what can be achieved via the parallel processing on GPUs. The two will be made one, and the languages and compilers will leverage such unified architecture. The freedom to not manage multiple copies of textures for caching and geometry for physics vs display decreases total RAM requirements, i.e., it doubles available RAM simply removing the bottleneck.

      You can see this happening slowly with the architectures of new gaming consoles and APUs. Hint: That's why GPU makers are bought by CPU makers. The compiler challenges are being met. The idea of "hardware accelerated" is literally retarding. Haiku is doing things the right way. Forcing hardware makers to fix the problem with a better solution instead of carrying forward the same fucked up and bad CPU chipset designs is harming the computing industry, esp. on mobiles where using the full device capabilities is more important. Perpetuating the kludge with "hardware acceleration" is the wrong side of history, as history has shown. It is the short-term practical approach given the emergent nature of technology, but realize the truth: Linux and Windows and OSX are helping to hold us back in a sense by perpetuation of the established but flawed graphics kludge.

      Hardware is inexorably linked to software. Always has been. Do not let the academics fool you. x86 has ENTER and LEAVE instructions to do the C way of stack manipulation for function calls (rather than heap functions for closures and coroutines) thus making certain languages with the C idiom of functions operate faster since they are designed for that specific use case. The trend is away from such specifics (indeed we need a separate stack for return pointers to eliminate stack smashing vulns). The modern OSs will adapt to become just as Haiku and other alternate OSs are already eventually. The Mesa stack will run in "software" mode faster than the discrete GPUs can.

      I see fools in this thread who ridiculously paint Haiku as not supporting 3D hardware, when the reality is they are fools

    5. Re:No acceleration by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      I see fools in this thread who ridiculously paint Haiku as not supporting 3D hardware, when the reality is they are fools unaware that such "acceleration" is a damn kludge:

      Purists always whine about kludges, and they always get left in the dust by people willing to get the job done by the most expedient means. Intel has been working on replacing GPUs with CPUs for over a decade now (remember their various raytracers?) and they gave up and began integrating more powerful GPUs. Nobody agrees with you. Build a bridge and get over it. Coprocessors are here to stay.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    6. Re:No acceleration by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2

      Please let me know where you work as a hardware designer so that I can make sure never to buy your company's products. There is a cycle between specialised and general purpose compute that has been through about half a dozen complete oscillations. If you're only aware of it moving in one direction, then you're not much of an enthusiast either - especially as you have it moving in the wrong direction.

      If you want some further reading, look up 'dark silicon'. Transistors are still getting smaller and cheaper, but they're no longer consuming significantly less power each generation. This means that it's increasingly cheap to put things on a die, but expensive to actually have them turned on at any given time. For most efficient die usage, you want to have most of your chip covered in accelerators for particular workloads that are powered down 90% of the time but provide significant performance increases when used.

      There's nothing pure or noble about running code that is data-parallel, has little locality of reference, few branches, and predictable memory accesses on a processor that is optimised for sequential code that has a branch roughly every 7 instructions on average, has strong locality of reference, and relies on smallish working sets for good performance (the CPU) when there's a processor with a high-throughput streaming memory interface designed for branch-light workloads with lots of parallel cores (the GPU). It's just inefficient use of resources.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  6. Start of a trend... by Kittenman · · Score: 1

    Yet another OS?
    This plethora of systems
    Adds to general mess

    --
    "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
    1. Re:Start of a trend... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, the mess in your head that blocks you from knowing how many years Haiku is around, and BeOS before it.

    2. Re:Start of a trend... by sillybilly · · Score: 1

      I like variety, though I've never used Haiku or BeOS, but heard good things about it, especially back when BeOS was still an active business, with some folks who put their heart into it, but was steamrolled into oblivion by monopolistic competition. It's kinda hard to resurrect a dead corpse and breathe new life into it. It feels like people trying to bring step-dancing from the 40's movies back into vogue today. It's not gonna fly very far in this modern age of half shaved heads and pierced clits and nostrils.

    3. Re:Start of a trend... by Wing_Zero · · Score: 2

      When i was in high school, I bought a copy of BeOS. I thought it was really cool. it flew on my k6 with a matrox video card. it came with cool demos like dragging videos onto a 3d cube and playback all sides. really i think it had much more polish than Linux or windows of the day visuals-wise (my opinion linux still drags behind on this). even today, a modern OS struggles to load itself from power off in under a minute, where BeOS loaded itself in under 15 seconds. I would have loved to see it survive, but after Palm bought it, and gutted the company (all they wanted was the IP) it kinda died slow and horribly.

      I've checked in with the development of haiku, and other than re-creating the system in open-source, it seems fairly stagnant. I'm gonna be rooting for them, if they can get some modern chip set support, it could bring back relevance.

    4. Re:Start of a trend... by peter.kowalchuk.reid · · Score: 1

      What IP would they want badly enough to buy a whole company for? I can't find anything on this.

    5. Re:Start of a trend... by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      I like variety, though I've never used Haiku or BeOS, but heard good things about it

      I do not like variety if it mostly just produces various unusable things.

    6. Re:Start of a trend... by dugancent · · Score: 1

      Monoculture is the death of innovation and invention.

      --
      SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
    7. Re:Start of a trend... by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      Well, I guess there is a truth to that side too. I suspect that Microsoft finally made Windows so much better in the NT 6 series as Linux was getting "too good". On the other hand, I still think that the open source landscape is even too diverse. There's a lots of things which are essentially only slightly different from some other thing, providing only little innovation and mostly just causing duplicate work.

    8. Re:Start of a trend... by ArcadeMan · · Score: 1

      I heard it was 127.0.0.1

      --
      Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
    9. Re:Start of a trend... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      yes thats 2 decades of fail!

    10. Re:Start of a trend... by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      Actually it must have been 66.101.79.83... ;) (see what I did there?)

    11. Re:Start of a trend... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Fear of failure is the biggest obstacle to getting good results. If you can afford it, then having 10 teams go off and do things that will probably fail is a good way of finding the one path that has unexpected good results. The Haiku team isn't costing anyone anything (and their code is permissively licensed, so occasionally interesting bits end up in other systems). Even if it's a dead end, it's worth having someone check that it doesn't go anywhere - you never know, there might be some useful spin-offs.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    12. Re:Start of a trend... by sillybilly · · Score: 1

      Life evolves by mutations, and mutations mostly just produce various unusable things, but you yourself are just a whole bunch of lucky mutations starting from the very first bacteria that appeared on the surface of this planet, and so are all the other lifeforms around you, including bacteria, fish, birds, cats, dogs, chipmunks and earthworms.

    13. Re:Start of a trend... by sillybilly · · Score: 1

      Do a google image search on "still born mutation baby" to see mutations/evolution in action, and all the various unusable things it produces.

    14. Re:Start of a trend... by sillybilly · · Score: 1

      The open source movement is under extremely strict control by copperheads (all over the internet the term is either for a venomous snake, or for some party during the civil war, when the meaning should be undercover agent), pretending to look out for the interests of open source, but in reality making sure that it never gets usable or good enough, while allowing enough room for some new ideas that can be used in commercial software. Even the Linux "leaders" are preaching the virtues of the "cloud." Like how retarded can you get? The true innovators, like Knoppix back at version 3.4 in 04, Puppy Linux back in late 08, or even mplayer back in 01, are quickly hijacked and replaced with horrible and bloated newer versions that don't work properly, while the mainstream ubuntu, debian, mint, redhat/fedora, opensuse maybe with the exception of slackware to some degree(Patrick Volkerding used to be infected very badly, with plaque in his mouth that didn't go away until his parents could get some antibiotics, Slackware is also listed as 24th on the distrowatch.com top linux distros as of this moment, but it's pretty much the earliest distro still in existence today in some continuity, while Mandriva is 70th, but OpenMandriva is 25th), are guaranteed to be lead by copperheads. Just like worker union leaders are all guaranteed to be copperheads, sort of secret agents of the employers, and all you get out of a union is bullshit like union dues from your paycheck, or maybe a stupid strike you don't wanna participate in in the first place standing out in the freezing rain waving banners, but not much real tangible benefit when it comes to compensation or working conditions. And such a copperheadism or fake leaderism is prevalent everywhere in the democracies, including in US politics, what else you expect, history is full of deceit, inequality and powergrabbing, equality is not a stable state of society, equality requires tremendous effort and vigilance to keep up, and usually things just follow their natural paths and tendencies, slavery or the same thing under different names has always been part of human history, it's the way the world works, money talks, dog barks, caravan walks, rain falls, and when it falls, it's wet.

  7. Haiku for you. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Great ominous clouds rule the planes, jet propulsion of a modern age.

  8. Looking through their screen grabs by aussersterne · · Score: 2

    some of the window management features seem interesting to me.

    Why has nobody else implemented the Haiku version of tabs and the ability to "stitch" windows at borders? I can see convenient uses for those. Were these features in BeOS? (I never used it.)

    --
    STOP . AMERICA . NOW
    1. Re:Looking through their screen grabs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      some of the window management features seem interesting to me.

      Why has nobody else implemented the Haiku version of tabs ?

      IIRC, there's Linux DE skin that mimics BeOS.

      You should install BeOS in VirtualBox if you are interested.

    2. Re:Looking through their screen grabs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      KDE can do stack and tile like Haiku does.

    3. Re:Looking through their screen grabs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fluxbox can combine multiple windows into one tabbed window.

  9. BeOS kicked butt, give Haiku a break! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Too bad a few of the late bloomers are quick to jump on her grave. Multimedia was it's strong suit, and way out ahead of any Linux distro at the time. Try that with Slak, Mandrake or Redhat 6.x .

    1. Re:BeOS kicked butt, give Haiku a break! by cide1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      On hardware from circa 2001, BeOS had an audio latency of about 3 msec from input to output. I don't know the x86 / x64 number, but in 2014 running on the best ARM hardware available, by default, the Linux scheduler runs every 10 msec, so audio latency of 40-80 msec is pretty common. In many applications, that is quite a significant difference. There are good reasons why Linux has this latency, but it is a question of optimizing for different use cases. BeOS had a laser focused use case of Desktop performance. Linux is used on servers, desktops, embedded, super computers, and all kinds of wierd places.

      --
      -- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
    2. Re:BeOS kicked butt, give Haiku a break! by uvajed_ekil · · Score: 1

      Yes, BeOS was interesting... like 15 years ago. Today, not so much. And by not so much I mean, "People actually use Haiku? Who? And WHY?" I could do most of what I need to do today on WIndows 3.11, but that doesn't mean it would be a good idea.

      --
      This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
    3. Re:BeOS kicked butt, give Haiku a break! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm reading this on Haiku using WebPositive.

      And it works pretty much like BeOS did a decade+ ago.

      What's the big deal? where is it going?

    4. Re:BeOS kicked butt, give Haiku a break! by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 1

      As long as you're happy running an alpha browser on an alpha OS. Pardon me if I feel safer with respect to timely security updates on a mature platform.

      How does a platform utilising llvmpipe for acceleration choke on full-HD HTML5 video and WebGL?

      Does haiku provide touch input on par with modern environments such as KDE 5.x and Windows 8.1?

    5. Re:BeOS kicked butt, give Haiku a break! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      On x86_64, it's 1msec scheduler

    6. Re:BeOS kicked butt, give Haiku a break! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Linux is hardly a sensible point of comparison, because the reliance on userspace sound daemons (low-latency in-kernel sound mixing would bloat the kernel, but a web server in the kernel is fine...) means that you end up needing a lot of round trips to get audio out. On FreeBSD, for example, the mixing happens in the kernel so if you really need low latency you can pin a process to a dedicated core and have it pushing things out very quickly. Most of the time, it's fine to keep the buffers filled and allow other processes to share the core.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    7. Re:BeOS kicked butt, give Haiku a break! by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Says a guy who obviously has no clue about operating systems.
      Hint: a quick look shows end user systems are dominated by different window versions (which all are pretty useless if you are a power user and know real OSes), various Linux versions, to a lesser extend BSDs and finally Mac OS X.

      Conclusion: there is plenty of room for alternating OSes.

      Next time you tell us: there is only cone car company needed ... the 'problem car' is solved.

      Another free hint: read about Hurd or Plan 9 and you see, there is plenty of superb stuff which is not yet integrated into a "mainstream" OS.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    8. Re:BeOS kicked butt, give Haiku a break! by Bill_the_Engineer · · Score: 1

      I remember when people said the same thing about Linux. Boy have things changed.

      --
      These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
  10. Awesome! by viperidaenz · · Score: 4, Funny

    Open source OS nobody uses provides support for graphics acceleration hardware without any hardware graphics acceleration.

  11. Idle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I use haiku as a screensaver with VirtualBox...

    I can leave it open anywhere and my PC is quite effectively locked from doing anything usefull or harmfull (or anything at all).

  12. Ever hear of security by obscurity? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Who the hell has found and exploited a zero day for Haiku?

  13. Awesome! by kallisti5 · · Score: 1

    The radeon_hd work is mostly to provide reliable mode-setting and to enable the full range of resolutions on Radeon HD cards. There is talk of hardware rendering, howevever we need a pipeline to connect Mesa / Gallium to the card. DRM is very Linux centric. In a lot of ways our driver is cleaner than the Linux one, i've been careful to refacter quite a bit of messy code as I went. We're actually working with the Linux radeon developers to point out issues in the Linux kernel driver. Everyone wins.