Good news from the Haiku website today! Hugo Santos has checked in his compatibility layer for FreeBSD network drivers. This makes it possible to compile FreeBSD network card drivers in Haiku. Most drivers can be used with few to none changes. Hugo’s driver layer can bring lot’s of network drivers with a small amount of work, actually Hugo has already successfully build a if_em/Intel Pro 1000 and an if_le/PCNet driver.

Hugo writes: 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.

Nothing to do with the network driver but a nice read for those who understand Italian, Il tuo Sistema has a nice short-article about the achievements of the Haiku team over the last months plus a lot of cool screenshots. Read the article here.