Hi,
in the next Futures is comming Netbook with ARM CPU.
Is this a option for Haiku too?
Feedback, Iedears, ?
Take a look at this change set:
http://dev.haiku-os.org/changeset/29142
I hope someone in the GSOC will pick it up, haiku should work well on a ARM cpu.
Yes. It is not a question of if ARM will be supported but one of when will it be. Haiku Beta? Haiku R1? Haiku R2?
The focus is x86 for R1 but adding ARM support could happen too by that time. Depends how popular ARM netbooks become.
Code has been added for PPC & m68K - still incomplete, but ARM will eventually be added too, especially since many handhelds use ARM ( or MIPS ) and now netbooks will use ARM too.
A good idea would be a port of Haiku for Pdas/Smarthpones, that are knowing a good grow… Think a while: BeOS was famous primary for its multimedia skills on low-end hardware… and what’s better for an handled pc with (relatively) low-middle end hardware? Haiku would be perfect
What about a think about an Arm port with probably incoming Tablet PCs?
There was some discussion that porting Haiku to ARM is rather difficult. The main problem is that there is no standard boot environment or BIOS as there is for X86. Each manufacture has there own situation. So each and every ARM port would require special work.
Still, if someone can volunteer their time to do the development, it could certainly be done.
Still too early for ARM port. I would like to see one for Cortex-A9 but should leave it for 3 years to let the hardware get a good market share first and finish off x86 R1.
Most tablets & smartbooks will use Cortex A8 or A9. Support Cortex-A8 (iPads) and newer would be the way to go.
The ARM port is certainly interesting. There is already a lot of hardware that could potentially run Haiku, mostly smart phones.
However, just getting it to boot would not be enough to make it usable. The relatively low resolution and small size of a hand held screen makes the windowing paradigm impractical.
To make things worse, hand held devices usually has a touchscreen -which woks great for the formfactor- but it requires pretty large buttons to make it easy to hit them. There are several reasons for this:
- Fingers are clumsy, since the point of contact is as large as 1x1 cm, depending on how hard you press.
- The thumb (which you end up using a lot if you use the device with a single hand) is not very dexterous.
- Fingers cover the screen, so you don't see exactly where you are pointing.
There is good reason why the iPhone OS, Android and Palm Pre interfaces look and work the way they do.
To be useful for hand held devices (which I believe will continue to be the driving force behind the ARM platform), Haiku would need a similar, custom-for-handhelds user interface.
Few people from http://www.open-pandora.org/ / www.gp32x.com community are interested in Haiku ARM port [ Including me 
]
I am posting this from an n800 as a matter of fact…I don’t see the interface as the major blocker since most things can be easily adapted the n800 runs linux great and has 128mb ram Web+ should also work pretty well since tear(webkit browser) works well on maemo
IMO…waiting for the next gen arm stuff isn’t entirely wise when even older devices are already fast enough
oh, and since I have an n800 I would be willing to test builds from SD…the one thing that is a must is an on svreen keyboard that pops up or better yet diplays a small icon to access it when the pointer clicks on a text box.
Yes, the n800 might be a great candidate for a Haiku ARM port, since it has a pretty high resolution for a hand held. Still, the screen (800x480 ?) is much smaller than what you might expect on a desktop/netbook.
The iPhone, which has just recently been running Android successfully has a much smaller screen at only 480x320. Running it there would be impossible without a custom interface.
There might soon be a lot of cheap 1st/2nd gen iPhones/iPod touches avaliable, that could be a great target for Haiku.
I now own a Notion Ink Adam (great hardware) and I really wish that I could boot Haiku on it. Android is fine, but it ain’t Haiku.
I just saw that an ARM port could be harder to do.
Apparently ARM has different subarchitectures which require somewhat different kernel versions on Linux. Likely similar case for Haiku.
https://help.ubuntu.com/10.10/installation-guide/i386/hardware-supported.html
Notice Ubuntu had released an ARM version for Freescale i.MX51, Marvel Dove, TI OMAP & Versatile (ARM’s dev platform). There were slight hardware differences with ARM CPUs from different vendors which required installing a different kernel for each one.
Near the bottom you can see the ARM lookup table they were looking to use on Ubuntu.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Specs/ARM/ImprovedSubarchitectureDetection
The Ti OMAP 4/pandaboard is the best bet. There was talk about Haiku getting a free pandaboard at the end of last year, but I don’t know what happened.
I agree. Haiku should support recent and future ARM chips (Tegra 2, OMAP4 and later) instead of older chips
(Cortex A8, ARM11, XScale). I wonder why that free Panadboard never came.
Well the raspberry Pi will be coming out this December. What if Haiku holds a little fund raiser to buy all the main developers one of these devices. For 25-35 usd one it wouldn’t have to raise much.
This is just a suggestion - pick the easiest possible ARM platform and port to it as a proof of concept. After that is done, pick the most popular platform and port to that.
Haiku has not really been tested on a non-X86 platform, there are likely to be a variety of issues. So make it easy first time.
As I understand it… the rasberry Pi is basically a GPU with a small very low end ARM processor stuck on it… I think the GPU is even initialized before the CPU so… dunno how that would work it echos the whole ARM has no standard boot process mentioned before.
That said… it would be nice to get the whole of haiku compiling and running in qemu-arm with the lowest commond denominator configuration (probably ARMv6 as newer stuff is ARMv7 and ARMv8)… and leave the specific bits for later.