Haiku booting in UEFI mode

https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/jessicah/2016-12-15_uefi_progress_update

by return_0e • 10 years ago

226 94 10 years ago

haiku-os.org

Esau• 10 years ago

Nice to see its development is continuing.

Lio• 10 years ago

From the website:-

"Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful."

hyperhopper• 10 years ago

That still doesn't say much. Why would I be interested in this over linux?

The FAQ doesn't even say whats good about it, just that it targets personal computing, which windows and OSX would also say. Ubuntu too, probably.

Steeeve• 10 years ago

Haiku is a good

system for computing things

but details are slim

jaclaz7• 10 years ago

You are probably too young to have tested in the good ol'times the original BeOS.

It was IMHO a "revolution" that - for whatever reasons - never happened.

Don't ask me the actual "technical" details, but it was small, very, very fast, even on the limited hardware of the time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS

I have no idea if Haiku is (will be) as faster as it was BeOS at the time (when compared on the same hardware to Windows 9x or NT 4.00) when compared to a "current" Windows or Linux or MacOS, but at the time it blew away any other OS, particularly when it came to browsing the web or for music, video, etc.

rglullis• 10 years ago

Why would you be interested in it over Linux? If you are comparing it for 2016 state of PC computing Linux, nothing. There is no killer app on BeOS/Haiku that could justify it.

But if you want to compare it to 1998-style PC, BeOS was a really high-performance, POSIX-compatible OS. It could do things that neither Windows NT, Linux or MacOS (pre- OSX) could do, and it could do it even on very limited hardware.

Nowadays, I think that if Haiku could be ported to ARM, it would become a very interesting alternative for any kind of SOC-based appliance where you'd need more than a microcontroller but something like Linux/Android is overkill: smart TVs, audio/video receivers, smart home hubs, some cool guitar sound effect pedal, etc...

qubex10• 10 years ago

You would not be ’interested’ in “running [Haiku] over Linux”: the latter has evolved, the former is a re-implementation of an innovative 1990s OS that has since been left behind by about fifteen years of lack of progress.

It was fascinating and awesome at the time, however, and for many of us this project brings back those erstwhile thrills. It's a kind of futuristic retrocomputing thing that (I guess) leads others to still wax lyrical about other obsolete platforms such as (say) Amiga.

zokula• 10 years ago

BeOS and Haiku are fun and fast hobby toy OS'es however do not expect to do any heavy duty work under them. Back in the day BeOS would play games plus opening a bunch of videos and mp3s at the same time and have them run smooth, but it would also grind to a halt doing any networking activity outside of web browsing, printing, running Mozilla or using its native Office Suite GoBe Office or Abiword.

The shine came off BeOS around around 1999/2000 when Windows 2000 and Mac OS X came out along with Linux and FreeBSD were much better OS'es for getting real work done with better networking and better heavy load tolerance. And you could do BeOS tricks on top of that on those OS'es.

On top of that the Amiga OS was doing what BeOS was famous for years before just without memory protection slower hardware.

userbinator• 10 years ago

From the BeOS wiki page:

"It has partial POSIX compatibility and access to a command-line interface through Bash, although internally it is not a Unix-derived operating system."

From that and just browsing around, it seems to be a vaguely Unix-ish environment; or at least it has more in common with Unices than the CPM/DOS/Windows or other OS families.

qubex10• 10 years ago

The BeOS kernel is as totally un-UNIX-like as (say) Windows NT/2K/XP/7/8/10, designed from the bottom-up to be “pervasively multi-threaded” at a time when multi-core chips were at least fifteen years away and multi-processor systems were utterly exotic, lacking even the most fundamental UNIX precepts (everything-is-a-file; multi-user environment; GUI mandatory and in-built). It just ‘seems’ UNIX-ish at first glance because it has a POSIX compatibility layer added on top in hindsight (or foresight) to provide a standardised shell and GNU userland utilities, as well as providing the key compiler toolchain (GCC 2-or-3-dot-something, if memory serves).

HAIKU is basically a clean-room reimplementation of the public (and private) framework modules' APIs and as such doesn't even (really) descend from BeOS-proper at all.

(Avid late-1990s BeOS user, dual PowerPC 603e-133 BeBox owner, HAIKU supporter.)

rcarmo2• 10 years ago

This is cool to see. I'm a bit sad that the ARM port hasn't made any visible progress - I remember back when the Raspberry Pi came out that there were a few discussions about other hardware being more adequate/future proof, and now that there's a quad core model it would be a great OS to run...

mhd• 10 years ago

And the Raspberry Pi's GPIO connectors would take us full circle back to the "Geekport" of the original BeBoxen.

djsumdog3• 10 years ago

It had GPIO? I remember the videos that showed the CPU indicator LEDs on the front panel.

tqh• 10 years ago

The minnowboard has GPIO connectors, and has already managed to boot Haiku in UEFI mode. A bit expensive though.

waddlesplash8• 10 years ago

The ARM port presently boots all the way to the startup screen, but then it halts because it has no way of reading the boot medium, because the USB stack hasn't been ported to ARM. Patches accepted! :)

rcarmo2• 10 years ago

It would probably help if there was some/better/easier to find documentation on how to get a build going.

Philipp__• 10 years ago

Amazing! I was not around when BeOS was the thing, but I read a lot about it, and it seemed way ahead of it's time, at least to me from today's standpoint. I play with Haiku from time to time.

foxhop• 10 years ago

When I was at SCaLE 11 conference a few years back I had the pleasure of learning about haiku from one of the creators. He was demoing "big buck bunny" in HD on some really tiny and underpowered hardware.

As a comparison the had builds with other operating systems and they could not compete, they ran very choppy, like 3 fps.

I suggest you try it out. It's refreshing to tinker with an OS that is so fundamentally different. When I went home I installed it on a few machines I had, which were collecting dust. Tinkering with haiku sort of reinvigorated my original wonder of computing from when I as a kid, for a couple months.

Later at the conference, I was helping at the Python booth, and I asked if haiku supported Python. The haiku guy was not sure but he got it to compile and run about 4 minutes later, and it worked!

rasz_pl• 10 years ago

That only means one person was able to implement hardware video decoding while others didnt, nothing to do with OS itself.

waddlesplash8• 10 years ago

Actually, Haiku doesn't have any hardware video decoding. It's all software.

Panino2• 10 years ago

I have Haiku running on an old Pentium 4 laptop. It's definitely worth a look! Just a few notes after booting it up just now:

  * Connected to my site via TLSv1.2/ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
  * Played a Youtube video just fine
  * Was able to git and build libsodium, via the installed gcc 2.95.3
  * wget'd an h.264 mp4 file and watched it via MediaPlayer
  * OpenSSH 7.1 (newer Haiku ISOs may include a more recent release)

Haiku isn't my daily driver, and I think the security model is increasingly out of touch, but it's worth a look and I wish the project well. Check it out.

waddlesplash8• 10 years ago

The default build of Haiku is dual-GCC, you can switch to GCC5 by typing "setarch x86" in any shell.

And the security model can't be helped if we want to maintain binary compatibility with BeOS - once we (mostly) drop that, we'll switch to something more sane in that department.

benley• 10 years ago

How long do you expect to maintain BeOS binary compatibility? I see in the trac roadmap that R2 is slated to be the deprecation point; is that still likely to be multiple years away? Has there been talk of an abi compatibility layer that would allow the kernel to move forward independently from the legacy platform?

Sorry if these are repetitive questions btw. I'm just curious.

Panino2• 10 years ago

you can switch to GCC5 by typing "setarch x86" in any shell

Awesome, that worked. Thanks!

It's also great to hear that Haiku will eventually improve the security model. That is its biggest weakness IMO, and removing it will open a lot of new doors.

talideon2• 10 years ago

64-bit Haiku would maybe be a good opportunity to fix the security model, but I've no idea how feasible that would be.

ktRolster2• 10 years ago

I have forever felt bitter about Haiku OS, ever since I realized they don't write all their code comments in haiku form.

Sigh, so sad.

waddlesplash8• 10 years ago

We do, however, have a very nice collection of haikus about Haiku: https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/data/system/data/... :)

(Although some of those are inaccurate these days - we've had OpenJDK for a few years now, for instance.)

ktRolster2• 10 years ago

Can't you at least put one haiku in the comments? Somewhere? Anywhere??

pherq• 10 years ago

And yet you yourself

Refuse to make the effort

To write in haiku.

ComodoHacker• 10 years ago

Is it ready yet for any real-world use cases? Like torrent station/media server or NAS or internet gateway.

chmike• 10 years ago

We need more OS diversity. Putting all the eggs in the same basket is too dangerous regarding security. I'm very impressed by the work of the Haiku community.

the_why_of_y• 10 years ago

Yes, putting all our eggs in the "POSIXy, monolithic kernel implemented in C with MMU-isolated processes, ambient authority, shared mutable state concurrency" OS basket feels unwise.

waddlesplash8• 10 years ago

Well, Haiku isn't too different from that anyways. The kernel is very much C++ and not C, and does have certain hybrid tendencies (it's a lot less monolithic and statically linked than Linux is at least), but most drivers still run in kernel space and the process model is very POSIXy, with most of the other attributes you listed, as well...

Haiku booting in UEFI mode

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