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HaikuOS running on RISC-V hardware (HiFive Unmatched)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
eric__cartman 5y ago
It's always nice to see the wonderful advancements the HaikuOS devs make. As an operating system it's very nice and fun to use. It gives me the same vibes as old workstations from the 90s. Although it still has a bit longer to go before it could be considered as a daily driver for any useful assortment of applications.
- andi999 5y ago
  I am very pessimistic. I think it would need a strong usp or some killer app. Maybe going into hard real time direction might allow it to live in a niche in audio and machine operation console. But currently I don't see a path.
  - ozfive 5y ago
    This was the same argument for BeOS back in the day.
  - techrat 5y ago
    Realtime audio on hardware that isn't sold by Apple would be quite a killer reason to use Haiku. Especially seeing Apple is progressively abandoning the Pro, configurable market again.
    - skavi 5y ago
      realtime audio and good color management are two things a lot of people use macOS for..
    - gjsman-1000 5y ago
      They released a Mac Pro, as configurable as you could desire, less than two years ago and have a replacement already in the works. They aren’t abandoning the market.
      - samatman 5y ago
        I agree with that for what it's worth. People who aren't in the industry don't really realize that the Mac Mini is the entry-level into audio production for most people (iMac is the same for video). It has just enough to get started, and when you're making the big bucks the Mac Pro is in fact affordable for what you get. Developers only see MacBooks for so long that they forget the rest of the product line exists, yet it's there for a reason.
        jbluepolarbear 5y ago
        What profession is the Mac Pro targeted? They used to be great for video production and 3D modeling, animation, and light baking, but the current version just isn’t good enough and I’m seeing more and more professionals opt for a pc with a big dedicated gpu.
      - michaelmrose 5y ago
        It starts at 6000 and has similar specs to $2600 dell or alternatively a $1500 machine you could build. Just going from the dinky 256GB SSD your 6000 machine comes with to a more reasonable 2TB actually takes you to 6800. Furthermore for this very substantial price you are buying a machine on an arch they are in the process of abandoning a bigger issue than the price. To recap in 2013 the trash can came out. It was I guess OK but by 2015 its specs were noncompetitive. Between 2015-most of 2019 there was no real great answer for a mac tower. At the cusp of 2020 the new tower emerged followed 1 year later by the announcement that everything is moving to arm sooner or later. Out of the last 8 years there has been one year in which it was a great year to get a mac tower and only if you are rich.
        bboygravity 5y ago
        Yes. But you get properly working real-time audio out of the box with the Mac Pro that you don't get with any PC system. Assuming that this is true (which it is based off of the other comments) then that is EASILY worth the extra 4000 or even 10.000 USD to someone who needs real-time audio to do their recording or other audio creation job. When I became a professional (in another field than audio/music) I developed 0 tolerance for tech that didn't work or that has me fiddle around with it for hours to work. It financially just doesn't make any sense to spend your time on that. It also doesn't make any sense from a mental health and free-time point of view. I think that was the point (even though I'm not knowledgeable on the subject, other than having spent many day of my hobby-life trying to get Cubase to record with audio monitor (VST) without jittery latency on Windows and utterly failed).
    - diskzero 5y ago
      Our final pivot at Be was HARP, the Home Audio Reference Platform, which we thought would be a killer reason to use BeOS. It was not a success.
    - squarefoot 5y ago
      I would definitely consider Haiku for music if it had the same low latency capabilities as BeOS, but latency aside, a lot changed since the BeOS era: today pretty much all non consumer audio interfaces are external, therefore driver support for them is needed as well. Also it's not uncommon to see hybrid systems in which Linux runs a DAW and its plugins under WINE. It's a mess to configure and breaks very easily (lesson learned: don't do that in your tinkering machine that you upgrade often or install/compile different kernels etc. use a separate machine for Linux+music), so a WINE port would be useful as well, but I guess it'd be a huge job.
  - agildehaus 5y ago
    Why does everything need commercial success? It's survived for 20 years despite having none. It will continue as long as there are interested developers.
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    If I'm not mistaken it already has a bit of an audience as a replacement for old BeOS boxes in radio broadcasting.
    - themodelplumber 5y ago
      The Channel Caster 16, probably the most capable Haiku OS commercial system available at present. Yours for only $3199. http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/command-center-system-packages.html http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/command-center-system-pack...
      - brirec 5y ago
        > probably the most capable Haiku OS commercial system Not knocking this Caster, but it might also be the ONLY Haiku OS commercial system
      - bboygravity 5y ago
        Wow, how cool is that. It seems rather ballsy of them to go for HaikuOS. Is it because of BeOS legacy software they had developed? They have another system at the bottom of the page for a mere 1600 USD.
        tialaramex 5y ago
        Yes, this product historically was a BeOS product, and eventually it became cheaper to put together a version of Haiku with no show stopping bugs for their customers on hardware you can actually buy than to try to find hardware that would still run an obscure 1990s operating system. The very first versions of this product are essentially BeOS, plus an existing MP3-player type application, plus a little bit of software glue, the right off-the-shelf hardware and the know-how to use it for radio broadcast. It's definitely one of those products some HN regulars would dismiss as "I could basically make that in an hour". Me too. But, after an hour nobody else can maintain it and it doesn't work on anybody else's computer. The hard work is in turning that into a product that generates some net revenue, which is mostly non-technical work.
        5y ago
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    I've heard that Haiku's audio APIs are similar to those of BeOS, which are harder to use than today's APIs. I hope they can be improved though, if Haiku is a better foundation for real-time media than standard Linux (or even realtime).
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      The BeOS Media APIs enshrine a strange way to think about multimedia latency, which is maybe useful if your central idea is that you need to synchronise audio and video through different production pipelines, but doesn't serve real time audio work at all. I believe Haiku did eventually fix some of the most egregious mistakes in their audio handling for example for years if you played silence it made everything else quieter, which is a classic goof†. But it's a long way from ideal for this application. You can of course use anything, if your hobby is making music with Haiku, knock yourself out, same with a ZX Spectrum or a toy xylophone, but yeah, not ideal. † How do I mix samples for N channels together? Adding them together and dividing by N ought to work right? No.
      - smallstepforman 5y ago
        The Haiku MediaKit API was available 5 years before Fabrice Bellard published ffmpeg, and back in the early 90’s BeInc’s goal was to attract the next successor to the NewTek toaster, and to be the next real time audio mixer. This is why they emphasised chaining of media nodes and sorting our “performance time” synchronisation issues with their API. The famous BeOS marketing video demos such a device. BeOS kernel allows unique app access to a shared memory area, eliminating memory copies when sharing data. When creating the shared area, media apps can set several media access flags to engage the “fast path” if the devices have that buffer. These days modern graphics API’s (eg. Vulkan) offer the same buffer creation hints to help the driver figure out where to best allocate memory (device local, host accessible etc). Because not all memory is equal. I’ve used both ffmpeg API and BMediaKit (I’m the author of a Haiku native video editor, https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo). The BMediaKit API is trivially easy to use. ffmpeg is notoriously convoluted. Likewise, the native GUI API is also a pleasure to use. This is why my open source media editor is Haiku native (and not cross platform).
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  There isn't much needed to make an OS usable as a daily driver today. Just port Firefox.
  - tempodox 5y ago
    On a sarcastic note, I'd agree. But not in all seriousness :)
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      Why not serious in this case? A full-featured browser makes is the most important thing to make an OS usable today, isn't it? Of course I assume all the basic stuff like file system and device drivers, relevant multimedia codecs, bash or a likely-featured shell, SSH, basic GNU/BSD/alike command-line tools are already there. And that things like LibreOffice, ImageMagick, LaTeX, GnuPlot, Inkscape, VLC, runtimes like CPython and OpenJDK are next in the queue. But what is the most important thing which makes an OS usable today? For me it seems obvious it's the browser. If only there was a browser supporting all the today standards (including the H264 and AAC codecs support) I would already be able to do everything I need in it, the rest mentioned (after "And that things like") would just make my life slightly more convenient and fun.
amichail 5y ago
BTW, TeXmacs runs on HaikuOS: https://twitter.com/maxgubi/status/1235518013492740096 https://twitter.com/maxgubi/status/1235518013492740096
johndoe0815 5y ago
This is an amazingly fast progress, can't wait to try it on my Unmatched board... and the port is more or less still the work of one or two persons IIRC.
Htoioinan 5y ago
up
qwerty456127 5y ago
This is awesome but this is a rather strategic move. Hopefully RISC-V boards will emerge and this will become practical. Today, however, a RaspberryPI port could make more sense.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  It is strange to me that the RISC-V leapfrogged past the Pi port (per https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/building/port_status https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/building/port_status the ARM, including the Pi, exists but isn't very useful yet); I wonder why it made progress so fast even with poor hardware availability.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gogopuppygogo 5y ago
    Price and availability is my guess. I still have no idea how a $35 SoC like the Pi is profitable.
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      This can hardly be an obstacle in porting the OS. The board is here, pretty polished, feature-rich, easily affordable and available. Obviously the HaikuOS developers have just found RISC-V easier and having more potential. Or somebody just has sponsored the effort.
    - dexterhaslem 5y ago
      they're in bed w broadcom. also think of all the additional bite people end up buying to run em
      - qwerty456127 5y ago
        Perhaps. But this means Broadcom propagates itself the adorably right way, beneficial to everybody. Also note "all the additional bite people end up buying" is mostly made by other parties, often small indy businesses. E.g. I have bought a 3D-printed chassis suiting my needs from a local vendor (and they also offer the source model and customization on demand).
edvinbesic 5y ago
Are there any Pi/Nuc style boards one could get to run this on? I’m an old BeOS user and would love to have a little device to play with for nostalgia.
- grepfru_it 5y ago
  I ran Haiku on my Nuc for awhile. It is starting to show its age, i.e. doesn't support locking your desktop, no multiuser support etc. As an also old BeOS user, it's purely nostalgia at this point
blt 5y ago
Tangentially, had anyone tried the HiFive Unmatched for numpy/matplotlib/browser type workloads on Linux?
- drmpeg 5y ago
  There are no ports of Firefox or Chrome for RISC-V. I believe the JavaScript engine is the problem.
  - blt 5y ago
    Thanks. I'm kind of surprised that Firefox doesn't have the ability to compile with a pure C/C++ platform-independent javascript interpreter for odd architectures.
    - classichasclass 5y ago
      It does, actually: the POWER9 Raptor Talos II I'm typing this on uses the C++ interpreter entirely right now. (We're working on a JIT: https://www.talospace.com/2021/07/firefox-90-on-power-and-jit-progress.html https://www.talospace.com/2021/07/firefox-90-on-power-and-ji... ) I don't see any reason you couldn't build Firefox on a RISC-V system. EDIT: Actually, there is a reason, but it's not JavaScript. Firefox needs stubs written for XPCOM to map the ABI for XPConnect calls. Once this is done, it should "just work;" it's not difficult (I rewrote them for ppc64 myself).
      - spijdar 5y ago
        > Once this is done, it should "just work;" Unless it doesn't cough ppc32 cough Nowadays you have to contend with Rust, LLVM, Skia, and the other porting headaches... There are XPCOM stubs for a lot of platforms in Mozilla. Mostly bitrotted, but even if they're fully restored, I just don't think Firefox is that portable anymore. Although apparently there's a RHEL package for Firefox on s390 that worked fairly recently, so I dunno. EDIT: Using Debian as an example, the latest version is available on x86{_64}, ARM{64}, mips64, and ppc64le. And s390x. ppc64 is in debports. 32 bit MIPS is lagging behind a few versions, no idea if it just hasn't been rebuilt or there's a new blocker. sparc64 is stuck on 62, it probably can be patched up but judging by some bug reports is sort of similar to ppc64{le} in needing some TLC, and I doubt anyone is really using it. hppa/m68k are stuck on 52/50, left behind with the move to Rust I'd assume. All I'm saying is in practice I'd expect porting firefox to a new platform to be a pretty involved effort. Even if you have LLVM and Rust support, there's a lot of moving parts inside, and it's not like the old days where most of the platform specific bits were inside NSPR.
hestefisk 5y ago
Has anyone here managed to get their hands on the HiFive? It looks really cool. Would love one of these devices as my daily driver.
- drmpeg 5y ago
  I have one. They shipped back in the beginning of June. They're in stock at both Mouser and Crowd Supply. https://mouser.com/ProductDetail/SiFive/HF105-000?qs=zW32dvEIR3vHEV%2FPYYkdMA%3D%3D https://mouser.com/ProductDetail/SiFive/HF105-000?qs=zW32dvE... https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unmatched https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unmatched
  - hestefisk 5y ago
    Thanks. Quite costly but might be worth it. What OS do you run on it?
    - drmpeg 5y ago
      I'm running Ubuntu 21.04. As for using it as a daily driver, you might be disappointed with the performance. It's slower than a Raspberry Pi 4. Also, no Firefox or Chrome browsers (yet). You have to use Epiphany. It's really targeted as a development platform and that's how I'm using it. I just SSH to it from my x86 box.
      - brucehoult 5y ago
        Yup, the CPUs are around half the speed of those in a Pi4, and around the same or a bit better than a Pi3. The RAM is much bigger and better than a Pi3 (16 GB of DDR4), and also bigger than the biggest Pi4. You can run a real GPU in the PCIe slot and a fast SSD in the M.2, so things that use a lot of I/O rather than CPU tend to be pretty snappy. The gig Ethernet also works well. So does ethernet on the Pi4, but Pi3 is a bit lacking. RISC-V CPU cores equivalent to the Pi4 were announced around 1.75 years ago and the way these things go are probably getting to the stage of working test chips right about now, and boards in the first half of next year. Obviously the price is much higher than a Pi, bit it's not out of line with x86 PCs (just a low slower). If you're actually working professionally on RISC-V software then the HiFive Unmatched is affordable, and enough more productive than the current alternatives to be worth it. Later in the year, the BeagleBoard BeagleV "StarLight" will have the same CPU specs as the HiFive Unmatched for $120 (4 GB RAM) to $150 (8 Gb RAM). That's still above Pi prices, but much closer. It will have I/O closer to Pi specs than PC specs. RISC-V is still in its infancy, but progress is rapid.
hankman86 5y ago
Other than BeOS nostalgia: is there any good reason to prefer Haiku over [name any modern Linux distribution]? I can see that it’s fun to hack on an OS and make it your own. But is Haiku actually known to do anything particularly well that other operating systems struggle with?
- unixhero 5y ago
  As a tinkerer I would love to run HaikuOS for the fun of it. BeOS gives a really enjoyable user experience and the things we can achieve make them more than good enough for me. This is not a workload os, or a workspace os, its a having fun os.
- snvzz 5y ago
  BeOS was a good desktop, and Haiku reproduces it well, providing a high quality desktop experience. Meantime, the usual Linux desktops continue to fail at even the basics, such as low quality file dialogs that e.g. change your selection after you've already clicked. Other than that, BeOS system kits are elegant, so are its APIs for drivers and filesystems. Linux does instead have a huge, ugly, syscall interface. It just takes enough perspective to not see UNIX and its clones as the "end it all" of what an operating system should be, and then you'd realize it's actually pretty hard to come up with anything that Linux does better.
- smallstepforman 5y ago
  At its core, Linux offers variety, while Haiku strives to be a unified system. There is only one official UI, one sound API, one filesystem, one preference system, etc. making Haiku easier to administer. The system kits are designed to work together. For instance, I created a from scratch video editor for Haiku which does 4K UHD videos with OpenGL based plugins, with over 30 effects, and 10 languages. The installer package with no dependancies is 1.3Mb (fits on a floppy disk). https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo Under Linux, I would require many more dependancies since I have no guarantee what libraries or API’s the users have installed.
  - squarefoot 5y ago
fithisux 5y ago
I really like their approach.
rhdxmr 5y ago
I am not a fan of HaikuOS. But I hope this OS evolves and be loved by plenty of users. I like diversity of open source projects like this.
- unixhero 5y ago
  What's not to like?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Personally, I found it painfully mouse-heavy (ditto Plan 9); on *nix, I can use i3+tmux+vimium+keynav and basically never touch the mouse. This matters particularly on laptops where the keyboard is good and the mouse, such as it is, sucks.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Can't answer for parent, but my personal biggest gripes are: 1) No graphical acceleration yet 2) No application sandboxing mechanism (yet?) 3) A package manager that doesn't seem to have a reason to exist. To expand on 3: Native Haiku software really has no need for a package manager because it has no need for dependency management. It appears the only real reason to have it is so Qt can be installed as a dependency for the ports that need it. Why not just provide Qt in the base system? According to the developer I talked to, its because they want to encourage people to write against the native API. Ok, so why support this use case at all? Because ported software is better than no software. Either I am still misunderstanding something or this is an incredibly strange decision. Which isn't to say I don't like Haiku, indeed it understand Desktop as a usecase far better than any Linux distro that ever existed, I just have those particular gripes. As far as reasons others might not like it: 1) I hear that porting some POSIX software is a bit jank 2) There are no user accounts 3) Hardware support
    - smallstepforman 5y ago
      As always, AnIdiotOnTheNet has valid comments, but you cannot dismiss a journey because its too far, you need to start with the first steps and eventually you'll get there. 1) re: graphical acceleration, it will come when the user base increases, the 3 big players will eventually want skin in the game 2) re: sandbox mechanism, yes it's missing, however since Haiku has a read only package system, the damage a rogue app can cause is much smaller eliminating the need for sandboxing in the first place. Also, the Haiku system is easy to restore, and from a user point of view, I care more about preserving my data, not protecting a system that I can easily restore. This is also a fault of most OS's out there, they protect you from installing a driver, and do nothing for protecting your family photos. 3) see 2 1) re: posix, Haiku has similiar issues as the BSD's in that POSIX != Linux 2) it's coming in R2 3) see original 1
chrsw 5y ago
Nice progress. I'm already daydreaming about running HaikuOS on something like a RISC-V based MNT Reform.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

It's always nice to see the wonderful advancements the HaikuOS devs make. As an operating system it's very nice and fun to use. It gives me the same vibes as old workstations from the 90s. Although it still has a bit longer to go before it could be considered as a daily driver for any useful assortment of applications.

andi999 5y ago
I am very pessimistic. I think it would need a strong usp or some killer app. Maybe going into hard real time direction might allow it to live in a niche in audio and machine operation console. But currently I don't see a path.
- ozfive 5y ago
  This was the same argument for BeOS back in the day.
- techrat 5y ago
  Realtime audio on hardware that isn't sold by Apple would be quite a killer reason to use Haiku. Especially seeing Apple is progressively abandoning the Pro, configurable market again.
  - skavi 5y ago
    realtime audio and good color management are two things a lot of people use macOS for..
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    They released a Mac Pro, as configurable as you could desire, less than two years ago and have a replacement already in the works. They aren’t abandoning the market.
    - samatman 5y ago
      I agree with that for what it's worth. People who aren't in the industry don't really realize that the Mac Mini is the entry-level into audio production for most people (iMac is the same for video). It has just enough to get started, and when you're making the big bucks the Mac Pro is in fact affordable for what you get. Developers only see MacBooks for so long that they forget the rest of the product line exists, yet it's there for a reason.
      - jbluepolarbear 5y ago
        What profession is the Mac Pro targeted? They used to be great for video production and 3D modeling, animation, and light baking, but the current version just isn’t good enough and I’m seeing more and more professionals opt for a pc with a big dedicated gpu.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      It starts at 6000 and has similar specs to $2600 dell or alternatively a $1500 machine you could build. Just going from the dinky 256GB SSD your 6000 machine comes with to a more reasonable 2TB actually takes you to 6800. Furthermore for this very substantial price you are buying a machine on an arch they are in the process of abandoning a bigger issue than the price. To recap in 2013 the trash can came out. It was I guess OK but by 2015 its specs were noncompetitive. Between 2015-most of 2019 there was no real great answer for a mac tower. At the cusp of 2020 the new tower emerged followed 1 year later by the announcement that everything is moving to arm sooner or later. Out of the last 8 years there has been one year in which it was a great year to get a mac tower and only if you are rich.
      - bboygravity 5y ago
        Yes. But you get properly working real-time audio out of the box with the Mac Pro that you don't get with any PC system. Assuming that this is true (which it is based off of the other comments) then that is EASILY worth the extra 4000 or even 10.000 USD to someone who needs real-time audio to do their recording or other audio creation job. When I became a professional (in another field than audio/music) I developed 0 tolerance for tech that didn't work or that has me fiddle around with it for hours to work. It financially just doesn't make any sense to spend your time on that. It also doesn't make any sense from a mental health and free-time point of view. I think that was the point (even though I'm not knowledgeable on the subject, other than having spent many day of my hobby-life trying to get Cubase to record with audio monitor (VST) without jittery latency on Windows and utterly failed).
  - diskzero 5y ago
    Our final pivot at Be was HARP, the Home Audio Reference Platform, which we thought would be a killer reason to use BeOS. It was not a success.
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    I would definitely consider Haiku for music if it had the same low latency capabilities as BeOS, but latency aside, a lot changed since the BeOS era: today pretty much all non consumer audio interfaces are external, therefore driver support for them is needed as well. Also it's not uncommon to see hybrid systems in which Linux runs a DAW and its plugins under WINE. It's a mess to configure and breaks very easily (lesson learned: don't do that in your tinkering machine that you upgrade often or install/compile different kernels etc. use a separate machine for Linux+music), so a WINE port would be useful as well, but I guess it'd be a huge job.
- agildehaus 5y ago
  Why does everything need commercial success? It's survived for 20 years despite having none. It will continue as long as there are interested developers.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  If I'm not mistaken it already has a bit of an audience as a replacement for old BeOS boxes in radio broadcasting.
  - themodelplumber 5y ago
    The Channel Caster 16, probably the most capable Haiku OS commercial system available at present. Yours for only $3199. http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/command-center-system-packages.html http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/command-center-system-pack...
    - brirec 5y ago
      > probably the most capable Haiku OS commercial system Not knocking this Caster, but it might also be the ONLY Haiku OS commercial system
    - bboygravity 5y ago
      Wow, how cool is that. It seems rather ballsy of them to go for HaikuOS. Is it because of BeOS legacy software they had developed? They have another system at the bottom of the page for a mere 1600 USD.
      - tialaramex 5y ago
        Yes, this product historically was a BeOS product, and eventually it became cheaper to put together a version of Haiku with no show stopping bugs for their customers on hardware you can actually buy than to try to find hardware that would still run an obscure 1990s operating system. The very first versions of this product are essentially BeOS, plus an existing MP3-player type application, plus a little bit of software glue, the right off-the-shelf hardware and the know-how to use it for radio broadcast. It's definitely one of those products some HN regulars would dismiss as "I could basically make that in an hour". Me too. But, after an hour nobody else can maintain it and it doesn't work on anybody else's computer. The hard work is in turning that into a product that generates some net revenue, which is mostly non-technical work.
      - 5y ago
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  I've heard that Haiku's audio APIs are similar to those of BeOS, which are harder to use than today's APIs. I hope they can be improved though, if Haiku is a better foundation for real-time media than standard Linux (or even realtime).
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    The BeOS Media APIs enshrine a strange way to think about multimedia latency, which is maybe useful if your central idea is that you need to synchronise audio and video through different production pipelines, but doesn't serve real time audio work at all. I believe Haiku did eventually fix some of the most egregious mistakes in their audio handling for example for years if you played silence it made everything else quieter, which is a classic goof†. But it's a long way from ideal for this application. You can of course use anything, if your hobby is making music with Haiku, knock yourself out, same with a ZX Spectrum or a toy xylophone, but yeah, not ideal. † How do I mix samples for N channels together? Adding them together and dividing by N ought to work right? No.
    - smallstepforman 5y ago
      The Haiku MediaKit API was available 5 years before Fabrice Bellard published ffmpeg, and back in the early 90’s BeInc’s goal was to attract the next successor to the NewTek toaster, and to be the next real time audio mixer. This is why they emphasised chaining of media nodes and sorting our “performance time” synchronisation issues with their API. The famous BeOS marketing video demos such a device. BeOS kernel allows unique app access to a shared memory area, eliminating memory copies when sharing data. When creating the shared area, media apps can set several media access flags to engage the “fast path” if the devices have that buffer. These days modern graphics API’s (eg. Vulkan) offer the same buffer creation hints to help the driver figure out where to best allocate memory (device local, host accessible etc). Because not all memory is equal. I’ve used both ffmpeg API and BMediaKit (I’m the author of a Haiku native video editor, https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo). The BMediaKit API is trivially easy to use. ffmpeg is notoriously convoluted. Likewise, the native GUI API is also a pleasure to use. This is why my open source media editor is Haiku native (and not cross platform).
qwerty456127 5y ago
There isn't much needed to make an OS usable as a daily driver today. Just port Firefox.
- tempodox 5y ago
  On a sarcastic note, I'd agree. But not in all seriousness :)
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    Why not serious in this case? A full-featured browser makes is the most important thing to make an OS usable today, isn't it? Of course I assume all the basic stuff like file system and device drivers, relevant multimedia codecs, bash or a likely-featured shell, SSH, basic GNU/BSD/alike command-line tools are already there. And that things like LibreOffice, ImageMagick, LaTeX, GnuPlot, Inkscape, VLC, runtimes like CPython and OpenJDK are next in the queue. But what is the most important thing which makes an OS usable today? For me it seems obvious it's the browser. If only there was a browser supporting all the today standards (including the H264 and AAC codecs support) I would already be able to do everything I need in it, the rest mentioned (after "And that things like") would just make my life slightly more convenient and fun.

amichail 5y ago

BTW, TeXmacs runs on HaikuOS: https://twitter.com/maxgubi/status/1235518013492740096 https://twitter.com/maxgubi/status/1235518013492740096

johndoe0815 5y ago

This is an amazingly fast progress, can't wait to try it on my Unmatched board... and the port is more or less still the work of one or two persons IIRC.

Htoioinan 5y ago

qwerty456127 5y ago

This is awesome but this is a rather strategic move. Hopefully RISC-V boards will emerge and this will become practical. Today, however, a RaspberryPI port could make more sense.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
It is strange to me that the RISC-V leapfrogged past the Pi port (per https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/building/port_status https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/building/port_status the ARM, including the Pi, exists but isn't very useful yet); I wonder why it made progress so fast even with poor hardware availability.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gogopuppygogo 5y ago
  Price and availability is my guess. I still have no idea how a $35 SoC like the Pi is profitable.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    This can hardly be an obstacle in porting the OS. The board is here, pretty polished, feature-rich, easily affordable and available. Obviously the HaikuOS developers have just found RISC-V easier and having more potential. Or somebody just has sponsored the effort.
  - dexterhaslem 5y ago
    they're in bed w broadcom. also think of all the additional bite people end up buying to run em
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      Perhaps. But this means Broadcom propagates itself the adorably right way, beneficial to everybody. Also note "all the additional bite people end up buying" is mostly made by other parties, often small indy businesses. E.g. I have bought a 3D-printed chassis suiting my needs from a local vendor (and they also offer the source model and customization on demand).

edvinbesic 5y ago

Are there any Pi/Nuc style boards one could get to run this on? I’m an old BeOS user and would love to have a little device to play with for nostalgia.

grepfru_it 5y ago
I ran Haiku on my Nuc for awhile. It is starting to show its age, i.e. doesn't support locking your desktop, no multiuser support etc. As an also old BeOS user, it's purely nostalgia at this point

blt 5y ago

Tangentially, had anyone tried the HiFive Unmatched for numpy/matplotlib/browser type workloads on Linux?

drmpeg 5y ago
There are no ports of Firefox or Chrome for RISC-V. I believe the JavaScript engine is the problem.
- blt 5y ago
  Thanks. I'm kind of surprised that Firefox doesn't have the ability to compile with a pure C/C++ platform-independent javascript interpreter for odd architectures.
  - classichasclass 5y ago
    It does, actually: the POWER9 Raptor Talos II I'm typing this on uses the C++ interpreter entirely right now. (We're working on a JIT: https://www.talospace.com/2021/07/firefox-90-on-power-and-jit-progress.html https://www.talospace.com/2021/07/firefox-90-on-power-and-ji... ) I don't see any reason you couldn't build Firefox on a RISC-V system. EDIT: Actually, there is a reason, but it's not JavaScript. Firefox needs stubs written for XPCOM to map the ABI for XPConnect calls. Once this is done, it should "just work;" it's not difficult (I rewrote them for ppc64 myself).
    - spijdar 5y ago
      > Once this is done, it should "just work;" Unless it doesn't cough ppc32 cough Nowadays you have to contend with Rust, LLVM, Skia, and the other porting headaches... There are XPCOM stubs for a lot of platforms in Mozilla. Mostly bitrotted, but even if they're fully restored, I just don't think Firefox is that portable anymore. Although apparently there's a RHEL package for Firefox on s390 that worked fairly recently, so I dunno. EDIT: Using Debian as an example, the latest version is available on x86{_64}, ARM{64}, mips64, and ppc64le. And s390x. ppc64 is in debports. 32 bit MIPS is lagging behind a few versions, no idea if it just hasn't been rebuilt or there's a new blocker. sparc64 is stuck on 62, it probably can be patched up but judging by some bug reports is sort of similar to ppc64{le} in needing some TLC, and I doubt anyone is really using it. hppa/m68k are stuck on 52/50, left behind with the move to Rust I'd assume. All I'm saying is in practice I'd expect porting firefox to a new platform to be a pretty involved effort. Even if you have LLVM and Rust support, there's a lot of moving parts inside, and it's not like the old days where most of the platform specific bits were inside NSPR.

hestefisk 5y ago

Has anyone here managed to get their hands on the HiFive? It looks really cool. Would love one of these devices as my daily driver.

drmpeg 5y ago
I have one. They shipped back in the beginning of June. They're in stock at both Mouser and Crowd Supply. https://mouser.com/ProductDetail/SiFive/HF105-000?qs=zW32dvEIR3vHEV%2FPYYkdMA%3D%3D https://mouser.com/ProductDetail/SiFive/HF105-000?qs=zW32dvE... https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unmatched https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unmatched
- hestefisk 5y ago
  Thanks. Quite costly but might be worth it. What OS do you run on it?
  - drmpeg 5y ago
    I'm running Ubuntu 21.04. As for using it as a daily driver, you might be disappointed with the performance. It's slower than a Raspberry Pi 4. Also, no Firefox or Chrome browsers (yet). You have to use Epiphany. It's really targeted as a development platform and that's how I'm using it. I just SSH to it from my x86 box.
    - brucehoult 5y ago
      Yup, the CPUs are around half the speed of those in a Pi4, and around the same or a bit better than a Pi3. The RAM is much bigger and better than a Pi3 (16 GB of DDR4), and also bigger than the biggest Pi4. You can run a real GPU in the PCIe slot and a fast SSD in the M.2, so things that use a lot of I/O rather than CPU tend to be pretty snappy. The gig Ethernet also works well. So does ethernet on the Pi4, but Pi3 is a bit lacking. RISC-V CPU cores equivalent to the Pi4 were announced around 1.75 years ago and the way these things go are probably getting to the stage of working test chips right about now, and boards in the first half of next year. Obviously the price is much higher than a Pi, bit it's not out of line with x86 PCs (just a low slower). If you're actually working professionally on RISC-V software then the HiFive Unmatched is affordable, and enough more productive than the current alternatives to be worth it. Later in the year, the BeagleBoard BeagleV "StarLight" will have the same CPU specs as the HiFive Unmatched for $120 (4 GB RAM) to $150 (8 Gb RAM). That's still above Pi prices, but much closer. It will have I/O closer to Pi specs than PC specs. RISC-V is still in its infancy, but progress is rapid.

hankman86 5y ago

Other than BeOS nostalgia: is there any good reason to prefer Haiku over [name any modern Linux distribution]? I can see that it’s fun to hack on an OS and make it your own. But is Haiku actually known to do anything particularly well that other operating systems struggle with?

unixhero 5y ago
As a tinkerer I would love to run HaikuOS for the fun of it. BeOS gives a really enjoyable user experience and the things we can achieve make them more than good enough for me. This is not a workload os, or a workspace os, its a having fun os.
snvzz 5y ago
BeOS was a good desktop, and Haiku reproduces it well, providing a high quality desktop experience. Meantime, the usual Linux desktops continue to fail at even the basics, such as low quality file dialogs that e.g. change your selection after you've already clicked. Other than that, BeOS system kits are elegant, so are its APIs for drivers and filesystems. Linux does instead have a huge, ugly, syscall interface. It just takes enough perspective to not see UNIX and its clones as the "end it all" of what an operating system should be, and then you'd realize it's actually pretty hard to come up with anything that Linux does better.
smallstepforman 5y ago
At its core, Linux offers variety, while Haiku strives to be a unified system. There is only one official UI, one sound API, one filesystem, one preference system, etc. making Haiku easier to administer. The system kits are designed to work together. For instance, I created a from scratch video editor for Haiku which does 4K UHD videos with OpenGL based plugins, with over 30 effects, and 10 languages. The installer package with no dependancies is 1.3Mb (fits on a floppy disk). https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo Under Linux, I would require many more dependancies since I have no guarantee what libraries or API’s the users have installed.
- squarefoot 5y ago

fithisux 5y ago

I really like their approach.

rhdxmr 5y ago

I am not a fan of HaikuOS. But I hope this OS evolves and be loved by plenty of users. I like diversity of open source projects like this.

unixhero 5y ago
What's not to like?
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Personally, I found it painfully mouse-heavy (ditto Plan 9); on *nix, I can use i3+tmux+vimium+keynav and basically never touch the mouse. This matters particularly on laptops where the keyboard is good and the mouse, such as it is, sucks.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Can't answer for parent, but my personal biggest gripes are: 1) No graphical acceleration yet 2) No application sandboxing mechanism (yet?) 3) A package manager that doesn't seem to have a reason to exist. To expand on 3: Native Haiku software really has no need for a package manager because it has no need for dependency management. It appears the only real reason to have it is so Qt can be installed as a dependency for the ports that need it. Why not just provide Qt in the base system? According to the developer I talked to, its because they want to encourage people to write against the native API. Ok, so why support this use case at all? Because ported software is better than no software. Either I am still misunderstanding something or this is an incredibly strange decision. Which isn't to say I don't like Haiku, indeed it understand Desktop as a usecase far better than any Linux distro that ever existed, I just have those particular gripes. As far as reasons others might not like it: 1) I hear that porting some POSIX software is a bit jank 2) There are no user accounts 3) Hardware support
  - smallstepforman 5y ago
    As always, AnIdiotOnTheNet has valid comments, but you cannot dismiss a journey because its too far, you need to start with the first steps and eventually you'll get there. 1) re: graphical acceleration, it will come when the user base increases, the 3 big players will eventually want skin in the game 2) re: sandbox mechanism, yes it's missing, however since Haiku has a read only package system, the damage a rogue app can cause is much smaller eliminating the need for sandboxing in the first place. Also, the Haiku system is easy to restore, and from a user point of view, I care more about preserving my data, not protecting a system that I can easily restore. This is also a fault of most OS's out there, they protect you from installing a driver, and do nothing for protecting your family photos. 3) see 2 1) re: posix, Haiku has similiar issues as the BSD's in that POSIX != Linux 2) it's coming in R2 3) see original 1

chrsw 5y ago

Nice progress. I'm already daydreaming about running HaikuOS on something like a RISC-V based MNT Reform.