HiFive Unmatched as an everyday machine?

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1

Hello all,
Just recently I’ve been trying to get back into Haiku, and find VMWare a bit lacking. The graphics performance isn’t very good, and my laptop is one which spins up the fans far too often for my liking.

So just wondering, is it feasible right now to get a HiFive Unmatched RISC-V machine as a Haiku-only computer and expect similar functionality to what I get on VMWare/x86?

Presumably a lot of the stuff in HaikuDepot isn’t available, like Qt or Go, or Java?

Cheers

Garry

2

My understanding, from what I’ve read, the SiFive board is about as powerful as the Raspberry Pi 4, or a little faster given m.2 drive and GPU. So take that as you will, as I don’t know your computing needs.

As for Haiku applications, I don’t know if RISC-V Haiku apps are in Haiku Depot. I assume not, but don’t know, haven’t looked.

3

Thanks for the response. RPi-4 like performance is OK for me, I’m not expecting the Unmatched board to be anything like as fast as my PC is, I’m OK with that.

I’m just interested in “boutique” systems like RISC-V, it doesn’t need to be terribly quick, but I’d still like to be able to use things like Go, git clients etc.

Cheers

Garry

4

Git should work, Go won’t. Go barely supports Haiku on x86.

5

That’s kind of what I expected, not that big of a deal, maybe I’ll finally learn C++ and use that instead.

6

C++ is pretty awesome! But we also might be a tiny bit biased. It’s definitely worth learning, along with C.

7

The HiFive Unmatched is really cool but I’m not sure if it works for everyday usage already.
The OS itself should be fully functional from what I’ve read in the port topic,but packages are only build for x86 and x86_64 systems right now.
That means HaikuDepot and pkgman will be completely useless for you in the current state.
With some luck,Python may be preinstalled in the Nightly Images,then you can install the HaikuPorter script from GitHub and compile all applications yourself from the HaikuPorts repository.
That will take some time,but give you a working system with the apps you need.

1 Like
8

Thanks, I suppose this is roughly what I expected. Maybe I’ll leave it a little while, or maybe get an x86 machine to dedicate to Haiku.

9

I’ve used C for quite a while, just never landed in a job where I needed C++.