network

Teldar's BeServed Open Sourced, Code Merged into Haiku Repository

News posted by koki on Sat, 2008-04-26 10:33

As recently noted by Haiku developer Axel Dörfler on the development mailing list, Teldar Corporation has open sourced their BeServed network file sharing solution for BeOS and donated the code to Haiku. We are now pleased to announce that the donated code has been merged into the Haiku repository, and is available here. The package, donated to Haiku under the MIT license, contains user management and servers for several operating systems including, Microsoft Windows® and Linux®. While Haiku already has a native networking file system that has been in the works by Ingo Weinhold, the availability of the BeServed code will allow cross-pollination between the two code bases, eventually resulting in а powerful and solid native networking solution for Haiku.

Kevin Musick of Teldar Corporation had these words for us: "I am pleased to donate BeServed in its entirety to the Haiku project. After Be, Inc.'s demise, BeServed was no longer commercially viable and the pressures of my career and a young family forced me to pursue other opportunities. However, I am encouraged to see Haiku's progress and the ongoing commitment of the community. While I no longer have the bandwidth to participate in the project, I hope that BeServed will be useful in some small way. Congratulations on your progress and best wishes for continued success!"

BeServed is a network file system with support for attributes, MIME-based typing, indexing, and queries, all features available in the BFS file system as well as the open source version of BFS that Haiku uses. BeServed also features remote shared volume mounting as well as folder sharing management capabilities, giving the end user the ability to manage all their files with the powerful and unique advantages of the BFS file system over a LAN.

Thank you to Kevin for making this possible!

9 comments

Haiku Getting a FreeBSD Network Driver Compatibility Layer

News posted by koki on Wed, 2007-05-09 01:33

network, freebsd, compatibility layer

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.

9 comments

Haiku Network Stack Takes First Baby Steps

News posted by koki on Thu, 2006-12-07 01:32

irc, vision, network

IRC client Vision running on Haiku

Thanks to the dedicated work of lead developer Axel Dörfler, the Haiku network stack has started taking its first baby steps. After this commit, Axel himself and several others have reported successfully running the Vision IRC client in Haiku. Setting up the network requires editing a couple of configuration files, but it should be fairly straighforward for those brave enought to give it a try; Axel explains how to do it here.

Great work Axel!