Thanks to the work of one of the most active code contributors lately, Hugo Santos, Haiku is getting a generic FreeBSD network driver compatibility layer that will allow FreeBSD network drivers to be compiled and used in Haiku with few, if any changes. At the time of this writing, not only has Hugo committed the compatibility layer to the Haiku tree, but he has also succeeded in building two FreeBSD drivers (if_em/Intel Pro 1000 and if_le/PCNet) which are now capable of running in Haiku.

Here is a quote from Hugo himself: "My original goal was to enable the use of FreeBSD drivers by just having them compiled 'as is' by the build system. This is possible with some drivers, but not all; but even for those that may require some changes in the code, the modification requirements will be minimal (most likely related to interrupt handling). The idea was to make it easy to upgrade the drivers with fixes from FreeBSD and/or upgrade to newer versions. Developing drivers can be a hard job, and developing bug free drivers even more so. The ability to use FreeBSD drivers with little to no changes in the code expands Haiku's hardware support with little burden to our pool of developers, which is a good thing. By the way, this idea was inspired by Marcus Overhagen's ipro1000 driver, which is Intel's FreeBSD driver ported to Haiku using a very specific compatibility layer."

To achieve his goal, Hugo started by copying the functions necessary for drivers from FreeBSD and creating a compatibility library. As he tried more drivers, he added more functions to the library. The Intel Pro Express 100 driver (fxp) was used as a base for requirements; Hugo then wrote Haiku-specific versions of some of these functions and changed others as required. Some original FreeBSD code is also used, as well as some of Marcus' code.

This is still work in progress and, by Hugo's own words, there is a lot more to be done and tested. Nevertheless, this is a great addition to Haiku and we are all grateful for Hugo's significant contributions.

We were pleased to hear that Haiku community member Axzel Marín Graü is scheduled to give a presentation about Haiku at the National Open Source Software Congress (CNSL 3) to be held in Sucre, Venezuela, this coming May 18th and 19th. During his presentation titled "Open Source is not only GNU/Linux. Introduction to Haiku," Axzel will give an overview of the project, talk about the progress made so far in development, and conduct a brief demo to show Haiku in action.

Reaching its third edition in 2007, CNSL is a series of conferences held in 13 different Venezuelan states designed to gather experts, developers and users in the area of GNU/Linux and open source software. The conference was conceived to promote the formation of open source projects at both the regional and national level, as well as the nurturing of local talent.

CNSL 3 Overview

• Event
  Congreso Nacional de Software Libre (CNSL 3) of Venezuela
• Place
  Teatro "Luis Mariano Rivera"
  Calle Paraíso - Frente a la Plaza Miranda
  Cumaná - Estado Sucre
• Time
  May 18th and 19th, 2007
  Friday 18: 7:30am - 12:00m & 2:00pm - 6:00pm
  Saturday 19: 8:00am - 12:00m & 2:00pm - 6:00pm
• Registration
  Free of charge. Register online.

Note: JMicron monitors user comments and encourages all Haiku supporters to post their comments at the Haiku Website, instead of mailing them directly. Thanks for your support!

We are pleased to announce that JMicron Technology Corporation has offered to give our project support in the implementation of SATA technology for Haiku. JMicron has pledged to support the development effort by providing the required technical documentation as well as hardware for testing. Haiku developer Marcus Overhagen will be working closely with JMicron with the eventual goal of achieving full support for JMicron's SATA products in Haiku in the future. JMicron is a pioneer for SATA and PCI Express products. Haiku is an emerging multimedia desktop operating system. This cooperation will provide a solid foundation for multimedia applications.

Update: Apparently, after the above announcement, JMicron got a number of mails expressing the appreciation of their support. They kindly asked us to add the following statement: "It is so proud for JMicron to work with Haiku. No matter to others, JMicron would like to say thanks to all of you. For new coming chips, JMicron would like to get your great help as same as before.".
On behalf of the Haiku team, I want to thank JMicron for their offer, and I am looking forward to work with them.

Playing an MP3 over NFS on Haiku

Yesterday, Google has assigned 7 preliminary student slots to us, which is as many as we wanted to have. Haiku would like thank all the students that have applied for projects and those that have assisted in this step of the program. Overall, we received 42 student applications. In the next days we will finalize the list of accepted student projects for Haiku.

At 0:00 UTC on April 12, 2007, the list of accepted student applications will be posted on code.google.com. As some of you might have noticed, Hugo Santos, one of our student candidates, couldn't wait anymore and already started improving our network stack. Recently, he fixed a bug in our UDP protocol module which prevented the NFS module from functioning reliably. In the screenshot you can see Haiku playing an MP3 file over NFS.