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Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V
- hestefisk 5y agoLove this and love the idea of having a RISC based workstation as my daily driver. Any suggestions on where to buy it ?
- p_l 5y agoProbably wait for chinese risc-v workstations/servers to start showing up and get someone to buy it locally for you?
- davidcollantes 5y agoBeagle (https://beaglev.seeed.cc https://beaglev.seeed.cc).
- unwind 5y agoWow, getting Haiku on a board like that with proper "tight" hardware driver support would be so cool! Makes me think of the original BeBox and how much I wanted one. It, too, was dual-core! :)
- itomato 5y agoGPIO, meet GeekPort. http://www.hardwarebook.info/GeekPort http://www.hardwarebook.info/GeekPort
- wheybags 5y agoSifive are already selling some boards: https://www.sifive.com/boards https://www.sifive.com/boards
- snvzz 5y agoAn announcement of Allwinner D1 based SBCs expected at cheap ($12 has been named before) pricing within weeks, if not days. I'd go for that.
- brucehoult 5y agoBoards at that price level will have to wait until after the component shortage, but I believe it may be possible to order a higher spec'd D1 board for under $100 within the next few days and receive it possibly before the end of the month.
- brucehoult 5y agoThe best performance this year will be SiFive's "HiFive Unmatched" with four cores more or less equivalent to an ARM A55. Raw speed should be a little quicker than a Raspberry Pi 3, but the user experience will be better because it has an M.2 slot for a modern SSD, a PCIe slot that Radeon graphics cards work in (they demonstrate it with an RX 580), and 16 GB RAM. Pricey at $665 for the Mini-ITX motherboard with CPU and RAM, but it will give the best user experience. Production version is due to ship at the end of this month. Next is the BeagleV "StarLight". It uses the same SiFive cpu cores but in an SoC from a different company, and with a built in PowerVR GPU. It runs off SD card, but once booted can use USB3 disks. At $119 for 4 GB or $149 for 8 GB it's not a lot worse of a computer than the Unmatched. Due to ship September, I have a beta developer board now. Allwinner have their D1 chip in mass production right now. It has a single core running at 1.0 GHz with a draft version 0.7.1 128 bit RISC-V Vector unit, which improves the speed often 2-3x. Sipeed and Pine64 have promised Linux boards using the chip in the next couple of months starting at $10 or $12. Probably with only 256 MB or 512 MB RAM at that price. That's very competitive against Raspberry Pi Zero. I've had access to an Allwinner Evaluation Board for a couple of weeks and it's very very nice is they can get boards out at those prices. All the above are 64 bit and run Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu (I recommend Ubuntu as they have 21.04 images for RISC-V) and others coming. If you want a full featured desktop experience with web browser loading heavy sites, watching YouTube etc then you'll want the Unmatched, but the BeagleV will be close. Note: such a web browser isn't available yet, but once developers have these boards themselves as daily drivers it will happen. While the Unmatched / BeagleV CPU is similar to a Pi 3, with more RAM and better peripherals (especially in the Unmatched) I expect the overall experience to be like a Core 2 Duo from the mid 2000s, maybe better for many things with a decent video card. Think: original MacBook Air.
- hestefisk 5y agoThanks so much, such a helpful reply.
- seg_lol 5y agoDown thread folks were asking to run BeOS binaries on it, sounds like a great opportunity for a couple fun hacks. * ppc -> risc-v binary translator, much more tractable with fixed width 32 bit instructions * running this on an FPGA that already includes a RISC-V core like PolarFire and then instantiate a softcore PPC. hack Haiku to run the PPC processes on that core. Extra bonus points to dynamically instantiate PPC cores to meet load, make fast ones, wide ones, slow ones. What a time to be alive! https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt
- fogihujy 5y ago> hack Haiku to run the PPC processes on that core That sounds like the Amiga PowerUp cards with extra steps. :D
- compressedgas 5y agoThe extra steps are what ensures an invariant.
- seg_lol 5y agoI am reading this paper you posted, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26844036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26844036 this is really good. > the path of least resistance when choosing a strategy is to trust folklore, but the folklore is also suspect. love it. The bibliography itself is a work of art.
- seg_lol 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerUP_(accelerator) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerUP_(accelerator) This is cool.
- ulzeraj 5y agoIt doesn't look like there is an obvious download link (or I'm too dumb to locate it). b̶u̶t̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶g̶r̶a̶b̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶i̶m̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶e̶:̶ ̶h̶t̶t̶p̶s̶:̶/̶/̶d̶o̶w̶n̶l̶o̶a̶d̶.̶h̶a̶i̶k̶u̶-̶o̶s̶.̶o̶r̶g̶/̶n̶i̶g̶h̶t̶l̶y̶-̶i̶m̶a̶g̶e̶s̶/̶r̶i̶s̶c̶v̶6̶4̶/̶ Please refer to waddlesplash's reply. I guess you can try it on Qemu. Might test it later. UTM offers "Risc-V Spike board" among others.
- waddlesplash 5y agoThe screenshots in the linked thread come from an out-of-tree development branch; the "official" nightly builds do not contain any of this work yet. There is a download link in the thread for one of the test builds. It probably will not work on anything besides a VM, though.
- ulzeraj 5y agoThats right using the nightly build I had a black screen from every machine combination I've tried on Qemu. Does Haiku features a serial console?
- smallstepforman 5y agoHaiku is ideal for embedded graphical systems, since it’s designed as a single user low latency unified system. As the technology stack is unified (from the higher level user space to low level kernel), with a unified desktop environment, unified IPC mechanism, unified file system, unified audio and media system etc, it allows system builders to make lean embedded applications and tools. Case in point - the Medo media editor which does 4K videos, dozens of OpenGL pluggins and binary addons, and the entire multilingual package is 1.28Mb. Crazy efficiency due to being a cohesive integrated system. Haiku is the ideal system for a Risc-V embedded device (think car console, tablet, media centre, info kiosk etc)
- nerdponx 5y agoCould this kind of technology also one day make its way to consumer laptops? It seems like low-end computers are still so damn expensive for how shitty they are. I feel like I get more bang for my buck with a Lenovo x220 + a fresh SSD + a 8GB RAM upgrade (running Xubuntu, Mint XFCE, et al) than any new low/mid-market laptop.
- dejv 5y agoHaiku is lacking full featured web browser like Chromium or Firefox. They do have some basic browser available, but its capability is very limited.
- waddlesplash 5y agoThere is no technical reason one could not port Chromium or Firefox at this point; it's simply that nobody has put the time in to do it (as you can imagine, porting a web browser is not an easy task.)
- ori_b 5y agoThere's 600+ patches needed to build chrome on BSD, and upstream is constantly churning, which means they need maintenance. Upstream refuses to import anything related to BSD support, so they need to be maintained out of tree. And this is for a much more popular set of projects. "Not an easy task" is a bit of an understatement.
- emouryto 5y agoThis is very neat. Though, I still don't have an ARM workstation... Will we leap-frog to RISC-V workstations in a few years? I guess that new Apple M1 ARM would count but I have yet to get one.
- mlacks 5y agothe m1 mini I'm using is quite nice. not perfect, but more than adequate for personal computing and media creation
- retrac 5y agoIt seems more likely RISC-V will displace ARM on the low-end where margins on things like licencing are the tightest. There are already high performance ARM designs for servers in particular, and that's more applicable to desktops than any RISC-V chip currently available. X86 will give them both a run for their money but it no longer seems completely obvious that everything hefty will still be running on x86 five or ten years from now, for the first time in a couple decades, really.
- ulzeraj 5y agoDo you think adversarial country relations specially from sanctioned countries like China and Russia might count in favor of Risc-V development and adoption?
- retrac 5y agoI cannot comment on Russia, not an area I am familiar with. But I believe that is already the case with China. An industry planning organization in China has indicated the plan to standardize on RISC-V across the board, with domestically designed and manufactured processors. The intent there is, I'm guessing, to disentangle China from any IP issues, or supply interruptions should trade be disrupted. Chinese media has openly stated as such, for example this article from Sina.com (in Chinese): https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/2021-01-18/doc-ikftssan7728474.shtml https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/2021-01-18/doc-ikftssan7728... Since it gives me reading practice, I've done a quick and probably slightly butchered partial translation: Could expanding RISC-V be the cure to China's shortage of ICs? In April of 2020, RISC-V Foundation's CEO sent an email alerting the Foundation's members. The email stated that "We have now established the RISC-V International Association in Switzerland". The RISC-V foundation, which has been established now for five years, was originally founded in America. On account of worries about being influenced by political factors, it has moved to Switzerland, a country well known for its consistent neutrality and practice of supporting open source. [...] Over the last three to four years, in China's technology circles, more and more people have been discussing the adoption of RISC-V. This follows political factors having an increased influence on the science & technology industry, as well as ARM being purchased by NVIDIA. China's technology companies are ever more worried that the x86 and ARM architectures, in the hands of American organizations, may cut off from access in the future. In contrast, the open source RISC-V does not have similar concerns. "Regarding domestic Chinese companies, the relocation of the RISC-V Foundation's official headquarters to Switzerland is a very favourable development." said CEO Xu Tao of Saifang Technologies, a domestic Chinese manufacturer of RISC-V processors. "Most significantly, this means that the adoption of the open source RISC-V instruction set, open source software, and public standards can be utilized without any fear of unforeseen complications. It's my belief that this is an opportunity to establish the independence of IP for Chinese processors."
- xrd 5y agoWhat does this step really mean? Is HaikuOS usable as a daily desktop environment? Can you use all/some/? Linux applications on it? I'm really excited about using an ARM based laptop at some point but not sure if the Linux stack will work on it. Is this the same problem lots of Mac software wouldn't run on the M1 at first?
- sethhochberg 5y agoHaikuOS, and the BeOS it is essentially a continuation of, isn't linux-compatible and doesn't have that as a goal. It has its own kernel and OS stack. Its not really any more usable as a daily driver on RISC-V than it was on any other architectures like x86, but RISC-V support is a milestone because its likely the applications where a very lightweight OS like HaikuOS would be most useful are things that would fit more into the "embedded" bucket than the "desktop computer" bucket - like others in the comments have mentioned, think media kiosks, display systems, hardware appliances, etc. For some perspective, BeOS was purchased by Palm (the handheld computer company) before that whole corner of the industry started dissolving in the smartphone era, so thats the kind of device it was being used on commercially. (Also, RISC-V isn't ARM - your mainstream ARM laptop is probably going to happen especially now that Apple has shown they can sell well, but RISC-V is still ramping up towards that point of popularity.)
- squarefoot 5y agoFrom the screenshot: "Processor: 0 MHz"
- monocasa 5y agoYeah, TinyEMU doesn't have a way of reporting clock speeds back to the guest as they're probably not meaningful anyway.
- rcarmo 5y agoI'm actually quite sad that the Haiku community never managed to marshal the effort to do a Raspberry Pi port. It would have been a killer OS on it, but somehow it never panned out. (I remember some early discussions in the forums where at first the Pi was dissed in favor of the BeagleBone, and then because of Broadcom, and then, later on, because of "lack of openness", so I'm chalking it down to a mixture of bias and a huge blind spot...)
- waddlesplash 5y agoWe were never opposed to a rpi port, but it was much more difficult in the days of rpi1/2, yes, and the BeagleBoard was the initial target instead. These days there is some rpi4 code in the tree, but nobody found the time or motivation to work on it seriously, I guess.
- ianai 5y agoSo how production ready is haiku? Targeting the rpi seems like a strong “user-grab”.
- timmg 5y agoHoly crap. I want to buy a risc-v computer just to play with this! Do they have a raspberry-pi type device somewhere? (Yes, I'm too lazy to Google for it :)
- FullyFunctional 5y agoSee the answers to the same question elsewhere, but essentially, 2021 looks to be the year where Linux-capable RISC-V is finally becoming widely available (afordably). BeagleV is the one I'm waiting for but there are plenty more: https://liliputing.com/?s=RISC-V https://liliputing.com/?s=RISC-V
- fithisux 5y agoWish it will run on Beagle-V