Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V

https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/my-haiku-risc-v-port-progress/10663/86

by highspeedmobile • 5 years ago

304 86 5 years ago

discuss.haiku-os.org

hestefisk2• 5 years ago

Love this and love the idea of having a RISC based workstation as my daily driver. Any suggestions on where to buy it ?

p_l• 5 years ago

Probably wait for chinese risc-v workstations/servers to start showing up and get someone to buy it locally for you?

davidcollantes• 5 years ago

Beagle (https://beaglev.seeed.cc).

unwind• 5 years ago

Wow, 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! :)

wheybags• 5 years ago

Sifive are already selling some boards: https://www.sifive.com/boards

snvzz• 5 years ago

An 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.

brucehoult2• 5 years ago

Boards 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.

brucehoult2• 5 years ago

The 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.

hestefisk2• 5 years ago

Thanks so much, such a helpful reply.

seg_lol3• 5 years ago

Down 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

fogihujy• 5 years ago

hack Haiku to run the PPC processes on that core

That sounds like the Amiga PowerUp cards with extra steps. :D

compressedgas• 5 years ago

The extra steps are what ensures an invariant.

seg_lol3• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerUP_(accelerator)

This is cool.

ulzeraj3• 5 years ago

It 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.

waddlesplash3• 5 years ago

The 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.

ulzeraj3• 5 years ago

Thats 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• 5 years ago

Haiku 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• 5 years ago

Could 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• 5 years ago

Haiku is lacking full featured web browser like Chromium or Firefox. They do have some basic browser available, but its capability is very limited.

diegocg• 5 years ago

They don't have any kind of advanced power management, which is a requirement for laptops

pjmlp3• 5 years ago

I don't know, I would rather have something like RISC OS :)

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

cmrdporcupine• 5 years ago

cooperative multitasking, no memory protection, can't take advantage of multiple cores, and very much tied to the ARM architecture?

scythe• 5 years ago

Sounds like it would be interesting for a small-form-factor not-so-smart phone that's still hackable and versatile.

garaetjjte3• 5 years ago

Haiku is ideal for embedded graphical systems

Well, except there's no accelerated graphics driver (for any device) :(

dleslie3• 5 years ago

For the apps it has this doesn't seem to matter; not everything needs pixel shaders to be performant.

swiley4• 5 years ago

IME: hardware accelerated UI toolkits are very slow on all but the largest/newest computers.

Rendering a GUI can be done in real time on ancient CPUs. This has been true since the 1980s and continues to be true today. If your app has a performance issue then you should consider cutting down on the animations/special effects/abstractions.

yellowapple• 5 years ago

I ain't sure if that's strictly necessary for that use case, given how snappy I've found Haiku to be even with limited resources. It'd probably be nice, but having seen plenty of embedded graphics, I'd hardly call them "accelerated" anyway.

pndy• 5 years ago

Haiku is the ideal system for a Risc-V embedded device (think car console, tablet, media centre, info kiosk etc)

Haiku predecessor BeOS was present in yet even smaller version (BeIA) on embedded systems and Internet appliances [1] so kinda ahead of the times already.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIA

memsom2• 5 years ago

BeIA was still only x86/IA32. BeIA was very clever. It used a compressed file system and an ELF compression scheme, so in 8MB/16MB you could fit the entire OS install and still have space free... but it was not ever really embedded in the sense of running on low powered ARM or similar. There wasn't even a PowerPC/POWER port, despite BeOS originally running exclusively on PowerPC up till R3, when Intel was added.

emouryto• 5 years ago

This 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• 5 years ago

the m1 mini I'm using is quite nice. not perfect, but more than adequate for personal computing and media creation

retrac2• 5 years ago

It 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.

ulzeraj3• 5 years ago

Do you think adversarial country relations specially from sanctioned countries like China and Russia might count in favor of Risc-V development and adoption?

Symmetry• 5 years ago

Also, RISC-V's "Choose the features you want to implement" system is a big advantage rather than a disadvantage in the embedded world.

justaguy88• 5 years ago

I imagine some companies that make SoCs are worried about the nvidia acquisition too and would want an alternative

xrd• 5 years ago

What 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• 5 years ago

HaikuOS, 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• 5 years ago

From the screenshot: "Processor: 0 MHz"

monocasa• 5 years ago

Yeah, TinyEMU doesn't have a way of reporting clock speeds back to the guest as they're probably not meaningful anyway.

rcarmo• 5 years ago

I'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...)

waddlesplash3• 5 years ago

We 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• 5 years ago

So how production ready is haiku? Targeting the rpi seems like a strong “user-grab”.

timmg• 5 years ago

Holy 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• 5 years ago

See 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

fithisux• 5 years ago

Wish it will run on Beagle-V

Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V

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