New Drivers?

NeXT Computer, Inc. -> Intel White Hardware

Title: New Drivers?
Post by: cubist on February 29, 2008, 07:58:18 AM
So, say someone was inclined to put the effort into writing a few device drivers for newer hardware (graphics, network, other...).  What would be the interesting devices to support in 3.3 and 4.2?  Mobile vs desktop probably needs to be distinguished.  And specs available so someplace like OpenBSD might have to be the feeder for this project?
Title: New Drivers?
Post by: helf on February 29, 2008, 08:23:27 AM
I want a larger collection of FS drivers.

Being able to read more than UFS, HPFS, Dos and ISO9660 would be awesome... :)
Title: New Drivers?
Post by: Nitro on February 29, 2008, 11:46:42 AM
Here's a few things on my NS/OS driver wish list (desktop):

1.)   A driver for serial ATA hard disks.  Possibly a port of the Linux SATA driver (http://linux-ata.org) if that's practical or possible.
2.)   A new EIDE driver that supports IDE hard disks larger than 8.4Gb.
3.)   Support for newer sound cards or an audio library, such as the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, Open Sound, or ?
4.)   A driver for USB thumb drives.
5.)   Gigabit Ethernet.
Title: New Drivers?
Post by: mdriftmeyer on March 03, 2008, 04:33:32 PM
Quote from: "Nitro"Here's a few things on my NS/OS driver wish list (desktop):

1.)   A driver for serial ATA hard disks.  Possibly a port of the Linux SATA driver (http://linux-ata.org) if that's practical or possible.
2.)   A new EIDE driver that supports IDE hard disks larger than 8.4Gb.
3.)   Support for newer sound cards or an audio library, such as the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, Open Sound, or ?
4.)   A driver for USB thumb drives.
5.)   Gigabit Ethernet.

Ditto.
Title: New Drivers?
Post by: kb7sqi on March 04, 2008, 08:29:10 PM
I agree.  I for one would really love to have drivers for 8+ gig partitions more than anything.  USB would be nice also.  One of these days, I really need to stop working for a while & learn more about NeXT drivers/Objective-C.  I need a few video drivers also.  I'd even be willing to pay for some drivers!
Title: Not to discourage anyone but...
Post by: cubist on March 04, 2008, 10:53:34 PM
Quote from: "kb7sqi"I agree.  I for one would really love to have drivers for 8+ gig partitions more than anything.  USB would be nice also.  One of these days, I really need to stop working for a while & learn more about NeXT drivers/Objective-C.  I need a few video drivers also.  I'd even be willing to pay for some drivers!

Keep all the suggestions coming everything will be considered.  I noticed the portable side of things isn't really moving.  I will say large partitions are unlikely in the extreme.  This isn't a driver in the true sense of the word.  It's a filesystem implementation along with utilities to support it (fsck, formatter, probably dump).  Boot loader won't know about the format so couldn't use it.  And wiring a new one into the OS in a correct way is probably a challenge.  Though honestly I don't know, I never dug into those parts of the driver/lkm support.

Graphics devices that have published docs should be a relative breeze.  USB and/or firewire will need some effort as these are really buses and need quite a bit of intrastructure.  100Mb ethernet shouldn't be too bad.  But GigE is a different beast.  As the stack is so old and insecure, you never want a NS/OS facing the outside world.  But what the hell, we'll see.

Sound devices should be easy though the cards have a rep for nasty bugs.  However trying to bring another kernel-based audio structure to NS/OS is probably difficult and I'm not certain what the benefit is other than source compatibility.  The stuff at CCRMA is the last native audio model.
Title: New Drivers?
Post by: mgtremaine on March 04, 2008, 10:59:16 PM
What about a tun driver? No idea if that would be possible but somehow getting vpnc or something like that would be very nice.

-Mike
Title: Candidates
Post by: cubist on March 09, 2008, 06:18:38 PM
Okay, below is a list of candidate devices I'm considering.  It's more based on desktop than laptop (I don't pay attention to non-mac laptops) so comment, correct, opine, whatever....

10T/100TX
Wireless
GigE
Sound
USB
SCSI/PCI
SATA
Video
Title: New Drivers?
Post by: Nitro on August 10, 2009, 10:19:06 PM
An upgrade of the NE2000 network driver to full duplex would be top notch. :)  A native Nvidia driver would also be nice because it would allow (hopefully) adjustment of the refresh rate, unlike the VESA VBE driver.
Title: New Drivers?
Post by: cubist on August 11, 2009, 09:14:24 AM
Quote from: "Nitro"An upgrade of the NE2000 network driver to full duplex would be top notch. :)  A native Nvidia driver would also be nice because it would allow (hopefully) adjustment of the refresh rate, unlike the VESA VBE driver.

My follow-through on this one has been abyssmal.  (Shame emoticon)  Just too much work recently.
Title: New Drivers?
Post by: Nitro on August 12, 2009, 09:45:34 PM
Not to worry, that's very understandable and your efforts are appreciated. I'm finishing up an updated OPENSTEP CD and looking to add any third party drivers that would be relevant, so I thought I would revisit this topic.
Title: New Drivers?
Post by: andreas_g on October 15, 2009, 05:13:38 AM
A refresh of the drivers for VMWare's virtual hardware would be great!
There are several problems, at least in VMWare Fusion (2.0.6)

VMWareFB display driver:
only 1024 x 768 seems to work (millions of colors), it would be great to have more resolutions to choose from, adding widescreen resolutions would also be great!

SoundBlasterPCI driver for VMWare:
the only sound-output I get is the warning sound of NeXTStep (ni!)

VMXNet driver:
network driver is not woring at all! (it's said it worked in Fusion up to 2.0 and broke with 2.0.1, never tested myself)

The only VMWare driver i have no problems with is the mouse driver.

Also great would be a display driver for NeXTStep 3.3 under VirtualBox to support greater resolutions and millions colors!
Title: New Drivers?
Post by: pitz on October 15, 2009, 11:30:57 AM
Quote from: "andreas_g"Also great would be a display driver for NeXTStep 3.3 under VirtualBox to support greater resolutions and millions colors!

Maybe related... I use the VESA driver for OPENSTEP 4.2 under VirtualBox in Windows and it supports higher resolutions.   Haven't tried using it under 3.3 though.
Title: New Drivers?
Post by: andreas_g on October 16, 2009, 04:06:13 AM
@pitz:

This is good for OPENSTEP, but doesn't work with NeXTStep 3.3
Title: New Drivers?
Post by: Nitro on February 24, 2011, 03:38:02 PM
I should have mentioned in my driver wish list a new EIDE driver that supports IDE hard disks larger than 8.4Gb AND supports DMA access mode, rather than PIO mode.
Title: Re: New Drivers?
Post by: wmlive on October 24, 2024, 11:25:54 AM
A driver to enable PCMCIA controller chipsets more recent than the supported Intel 82365 would be great.

While the venerable Thinkpad T60 runs a preinstalled OPENSTEP 4.2 with up to 950 MB RAM and including the Ultrabay CD-ROM just fine (but no ethernet and sound), the PCMCIA slot is based on a 'Texas Instruments PCI1510 PC card Cardbus Controller' incapable of recognizing any PCMCIA cards like the Adaptec SlimSCSI 1460b.

Aparently there are already drivers for this device in OpenBSD and some other BSD variants:

man.openbsd.org/pcmcia.4 (https://man.openbsd.org/pcmcia.4)

bsd-hardware.info/?id=pci:104c-ac56-1071-8381&dev_class=06-07&dev_type=bridge&dev_vendor=Texas+Instruments&dev_name=PCI1510+PC+card+Cardbus+Controller&dev_ident=80ff2 (https://bsd-hardware.info/?id=pci:104c-ac56-1071-8381&dev_class=06-07&dev_type=bridge&dev_vendor=Texas+Instruments&dev_name=PCI1510+PC+card+Cardbus+Controller&dev_ident=80ff2)

Making the PCMCIA slot work would tremenduously improve the connectivity and storage capabilities of not only these Thinkpads.

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