Fair enough
Derp 
at least i prefaced it with the stupid question warning.
Well, bootstrapping Haiku on x86 is broken since the gcc 7.3 upgrade, it worked with 5.4 (see [haiku-development] Re: Implement 32 bit userland support for 64 bit Haiku - haiku-development - FreeLists “the gcc bootstrap build produces a broken libstdc++ shared library, with which exceptions don’t work”)
Is there a trac ticket to track this or do we have to remember searching the mailing list archives?
2 Likes
I was talking to @waddlesplash about this awhile back… when I was attempting to build something to test a bootloader fix IIRC, I think some jam changes and some of the things being done to fix parallel builds might have been involved in breaking it.
I think maybe if you just keep trying to build it … it eventually may complete, probably more likely to complete with a single job instead of multiple.
I don’t think the breakage had anything to do with the GCC version itself…
We have already tried this. It’s not a missing dependency or jam problem this time. It has been replicated by 4 or 5 people using different setups, too, so it’s probably not a host machine configuration problem either.
1 Like
Woah … that actually may be the same issue that @pulkomandy and @kallisti5 hit on ARM bootstrapping; except of course on ARM, it’s a link error with an exceptions-related symbol, whereas on x86, it “just” has broken exceptions.
For those who want Haiku on a Raspberry Pi-esque device, Atomic Pi may be the answer. It’s still $35, but run has an Intel Atom quad-core @ 1.9 GHz. I haven’t yet tried it, but it does seem that getting power to it is a pain, as you have to manually connect wires to the proper pins correctly the first time, since it doesn’t take USB or a barrel connector. But the price is right.
2 Likes
OMG YES!
Here, take my money… I’m not keen on the Atom as a daily driver for Windows but for Haiku… now we’re cooking on gas. Seems they are sold out right now but this is one to watch.
How crazy they didn’t do something as basic as a power connector though!?! How hard would it have been to just stick a standard (cough, cough, splutter) barrel on there. Yeah - there isn’t a standard but there are some sizes that are more common than others and a barrel carries more current easily than those idiotic microUSB things the RPi foundation seem married to.
Ah piffle… they’re sold out - everywhere unless you have $700 to stump up for a box of them!
Still this IS an excellent idea @rjzak and one I could get behind. It would be easier on the poor devs than hacking ARM and much quicker too. I never cease to be amazed at how slick Haiku is - it’s almost my daily driver now!
That Atomic PI is an embedded board… which is why no barrel jack is desirable, it’s designed to embed in something else that already has a power supply etc… and you can’t upgrade really anything on it except the SD card storage… 2GB of ram will be somewhat limiting even on Haiku for things more than basic tasks.
I’m not saying you can’t get a lot done with such a system,… but perhaps making it into a desktop is a square peg in a round hole. If you want a desktop you’ll get a much better experience and longevity by just bulding a normal desktop, or perhaps something like a Asrock Deskmini etc… the $150 ASrock A300W + $50 CPU + $20 of ram + $50 SSD is much faster, in every respect and more expandable… (and it’s basically the least expandable desktop you can buy). Granted it cost 8x as much… but it is an actual desktop and not an embedded system.
Make sense but we can do a surprising amount (on RPi with just 1Gb RAM although I get the instructions are more compact).
I was looking for an SBC solution not a full desktop (I have them coming out of every orifice). Seems that Haiku is idea for these small-scale solutions for web browsing and email. Ideally on something like the Intel Compute Stick (which doesn’t work, as I found out to my cost!)
Actually x86 and ARM these days have similar code density… CISC machines typically have dense code, while RISC machines like ARM have less dense code, but modern ARM machines use a compressed encoding to get around this. So, if you had an x86 PC running the same distro and configuration it would probalby be faster just due to x86 CPUs almost always being faster than ARM and ram use would be similar.
See here for some nice photos of a deskmini (smallest platform with upgradable ram/CPU with real storage options (NVMe). Not it’s a Mini-STX board even smaller than mini ITX. IT can usually use a stock case fan also though sometimes you need to remove the cowl for it to fit.
At $35, you are cutting every cost saving thing possible, including the barrel jack for power (not to mention the power supply itself, a 15W power supply is going to cost you as much as the whole board…). You will also have to provide your own wifi antenna, a case, display, mouse, keyboard, etc, at which point we are not really at $35 for a fully usable system anymore.
So, for me it still seems a better option to buy a refurbished used laptop instead. It will cost a little more (probably in the $200-$300 range) but it comes “batteries included”.
1 Like
Yes, this is exactly why I suggested a Mini-STX Deskmini… similar size to this can be built for $200-300 and that is all inclusive (except peripherals).
Unless the missing features of the Atomic Pi actually work to your advantage in some way… such as you are building a special purpose computer that doesn’t need alot of the things expected of a desktop. Such as perhaps it runs a single application as a media center or perhaps as an internect connected podcast device etc… still seems a bit of a stretch to me.
A Haiku computer on a PCIe card?
I don’t follow you? Atomic PI isn’t a PCIe card… it just lacks much of the IO and power connections we consider normal on desktops, and even most industrial PCs (though some of those will run on 24V etc… via screw terminals)
I know. I wasn’t serious. I was just reminded of the old days when, say, a 6502 based computer would have a daughter board with an Intel 8088 so it could run CP/M software.
In this case, it would be a whole separate computer on a PCIe card using the host computer for power and peripherals. Which would negate the entire idea of having a small computer for Haiku.
Well backplanes are still a thing… basically its a PC on a card for high density installs. The backplanes just supplies communication between cards, and potentially disks/network and power.
For example https://www.advantech.com/products/1-2jkp2l/pce-7131/mod_858ea8a7-6cab-4343-bb30-6629317c5ba6
Different hardware for different projects. The Atomic Pi might make for a decent Haiku-based media centre.
This is rather getting back to where we came in - despite some well-meant comments about “cheap” hardware (cheap depends entirely in your disposable income and as someone who recycles a LOT of older hardware, we also have to factor in running costs).
ARM is low power, Atom a bit less so and as the speed and complexity increase, so to do the running costs as I know too well.
Haiku doesn’t really have a USP that makes it stand out from the desktop big names - Windows/MacOS/Linux and BSD…and of those the *Nixes pale against the might of Windows.
So why would you bother with Haiku?
Remember those infernal Kodi boxes? (The ones that got everyone free sport/porn/movies/viruses and took the netflix passwords…)
Those were Android and they were cheap.
They did one thing and did it well. OK, for most that was something too hard to resist BUT if I want a machine that will run these A.N.Other OSes I can get one at any mall.
No one CARES if your $1500 PC can run Linux/MacOSX/Windows 10 because if you have the money you have the choice.
Haiku is fabulous at being something beautiful in a small space. Limited resources - and I come from an era when 1K (KILOBYTE) was a lot of RAM and 16K was unheard of. ARM changed things but it did it in the days when micros still only had a few Kb of memory. PCs were still flobbering along with 640K useable and many only came with 512K.
Single user machines for that age. We have multi-user, multi-role PCs now… but what we lack is a coherent, unique and simple OS that could (in theory) live on a boot ROM. Or do we?
All I’m asking here is to remember what this thread is about. A machine that just works out of the box. An appliance. No fuss, no mess… and it supplements (IoTishly) our existing huge boxes. It makes “dumb” TVs smart. It makes “Smart” TVs smarter and no one has to get nailed to anything to do it. (Sorry if that last goes over everyone’s head, but Towel Day is approaching.)
Sound great, but we will be facing some issues.
Not a single documentation is available for GPUs used on ARM platforms. So there is just no way to get native support of Haiku OS on them. Only the Pi has documentation on the videocore, but not the video processor.
I am considering buying an up-squared, it has a 4 cores atom cpu with 4 to 8 GB of DDR4, eMMC and interfaces for SATA and PCIe Wi-Fi board.
Moreover this platform is supported by Intel UEFI SDK and also their new fast bootloader.
Unfortunately the price range is quite high (250 dollars without taxes).