Good morning, good afternoon and good night! Thank you for taking minutes of your lives to read this.
I own an Orange pi 4 lts and I’m tired of using Linux or Android on it. I miss Haiku. I can’t live without it.
I saw on Haiku’s website that they have several images for several different sbcs. Including one from the orange pi but unfortunately not mine.
I kindly ask Haiku ARM developers to create new images not only for my board but for others as well.
Haiku is a great operating system and it’s super lightweight! SBCs are a great opportunity to gain ground in the operating systems market.
I reiterate my request, create new ARM images.
You’re not the first to suggest this. I have an ODroid XU4, a Cubox i4-pro and a RasPi 2B. All of them would benefit from a lighter weight operating system than Linux. The ARM and AArch64 builds are experimental and not polished as the x86 and x86-64 versions are.
The development team is generally based on volunteer efforts except for @waddlesplash who is contracted to work on general interest bug-fixes and so on. If you’re willing to pay a developer to work on ARM versions of Haiku, it might get done quicker. If you don’t back up your requests with financial support, you just cost the time of volunteer developers reading this which may have interests elsewhere. The only other option for an open-source freeware operating system, such as Haiku, is for you to download the source code and start coding the C++ programming yourself.
I’m trying not to be rude but I do need you to understand that open-source, free and hobbyist modifiable software is not as market driven as your post would suggest. Welcome to the forum though. I hope you enjoy your stay here and please be civil in your discussions.
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Buying SBC for Haiku doesn’t make sense until an early version for the board is ready. For example, Risc V tiles are available, but there is no rare Haiku version for them. To sum up, you need to be patient and make a thoughtful purchase, because Haiku ARM and RiscV do not exist on SBC yet, however, the availability of SBC in a few years may be minimal.
Please consider it
The few test images that are available will be very disappointing. None of the ARM systems boot to the desktop yet. When we reach that point, we will investigate how to distribute installation media for ARM systems. Until then, it’s mostly for people who want to help with the porting.
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In the meantime Haiku should just work fine on x86 based SBCs.
One problem with distributing OS images for ARM / ARM64 devices is the wide range of strategies they use to boot. There are 100’s of devices out there, all requiring a multitude of different strategies and binaries to boot.
Things have become a bit better with our design today, however we will need to “prepare” the SD Card with a unique u-boot binary for the board in question.
Here’s today’s design and the split.
sd card -> u-boot -> EFI -> Haiku
^
Custom per board | Standardized ARM / ARM64 image of Haiku
The above is what our rune tool is for. It “injects” the Custom per board stuff. Users can run it to add the custom u-boot binary onto our “generic” ARM/ARM64 images. No developer experience required.
- Rune tool: GitHub - haiku/rune: Haiku MMC image writer for ARM,ARM64
- The manifest of ARM boards it reads: firmware/manifest.json at master · haiku/firmware · GitHub
As @pulkomandy said, we still have a lot of work to do on drivers, etc which is preventing booting on a lot of boards today. however adding boot support for new boards should involve just adding their definitions to the “manifest.json” above. (as long as they have upstream u-boot support)
With all of that said… our arm image does technically boot in qemu-system-arm. We just need more people working on drivers for arm devices.
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Ha-ha, I remember there was a way in early 2000’s to run Linux directly in Win without installing it or setup a virtual machine to try it out. Of course it used memory to store the environment and some virtual machine technic, but it was quite simple to use it
NOW It would be funny such Haiku imge for ARM/ARM64 Linux 
Wow! My Odroid and RasPi are both on your list! I’ll have to try them out sometime!
Well, if I knoow well, you may boot Haiku, but you will get into early stages and won’t reach desktop.
The few developers who work on ARM and ARM64 this way develops both versions in quemu.
Of course if you did it already you could face that already. As I had not seen further news in the forum threads - possibly means developers had no time or success to eliminiate the blocking issues : missing subsystems or codes due to difference of platforms. Until I followed :
→ on ARM the PCI is not so important to enlist available hardware parts so read their presence, they must use - and this way code - other subsystems to help hw detection.
→ memory management also was a point, if I remember well.
→ and some platform specific stuffs those sometimes common with RISC-V, so those also made changes generally in Haiku even some code moved to platform specific or vice-versa moved to general libraries.
It helped the actual development of the officially supported x86 and x86_64 images/versions.
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