I have one of those cheap generic Cherry Trail based laptops and I would like to know if there is any way to run Haiku on these Cherry Trail devices such as ultra low-end laptops and those Intel Compute Sticks. Given their specifications I think they are great candidates for Haiku.
Currently I’ve been running Ubuntu on it for almost a year. It was a bit tricky to get it installed, but it worked out in the end. I’m eager to try out Haiku and since I take this laptop with me when I’m away from my work PC it would be great to test out the OS on a daily basis.
The biggest problem with such devices is that they are 64-bit, but they have a 32-bit UEFI and no Legacy Boot option (I have no clue how someone thought that was going to be a good idea). The only way to get this to work is to have the 32-bit version of Haiku with UEFI support or to create a specific 32-bit UEFI bootloader to boot the 64-bit version of Haiku.
Is there any way we can make this work?
EDIT: I just noticed there was a ticket opened in the tracker for UEFI support specifically for 32-bit machines, but apparently only 64-bit was implemented as far as I can tell: https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/10139
Do you have any low-level programming experience? I don’t think anyone else intends to try and work on this; it just doesn’t affect enough devices for us to prioritize it at all…
Basically, what needs to be done is make the EFI loader compile under 32-bit, and then to add the “long mode” support as in the BIOS loader (much easier said than done, I think jessicah mentioned some weird quirks that have to be accounted for here that aren’t in BIOS mode.)
Correct. There is also some larger work that needs to be done around making our UEFI less-x86 focused in general. UEFI should work on multiple architectures, but our current code only has ~x86~ x86_64 in mind. (not disrespecting the hard work others have done so far, just mentioning a fun task for someone that could roll this in to )
I have a Teclast Air III tablet using the same architecture. This means a 32 bit EFI while the processor is 64 bit. I would like to convert this tablet to a Haiku machine, if possible.
I found this for Linux:
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