How good is Haiku running in other operating systems?

Development OS
1

Hello mates!
Anyone has good insight of:
Does Haiku make a good container or host?
How good is Haiku running in other operating systems?

Would it be possible to compile it to run as Windows NT service on older machines?
What about older Apple and UNIX machines?
What should be developed to do this?

I am curious as I am interested in software culture archiving
and remember that there was a screenshot I saw once with
multiple OSes hosting each other as Russian babushka dolls.
Would love to try recreate that as well as use my old hardware
in some interesting way :slight_smile:

Best Z

1 Like
2

As far as I know there is no hosted environment for Haiku. It will run under VMWare Workstation if that’s what you’re looking for.

3

From what I remember it used to be possible to run Mac OS in BeOS PPC
SheepShifter https://github.com/cebix/macemu/tree/master/SheepShaver
and few other environments using BOCHS but that it did not get to HAIKU updates
Bochs for Haiku?

4

Oh you mean emulation? That’s different from running Haiku in other OS’s. That’s running other systems in Haiku.

5

I know it is different but I am interested in both directions!

6

Haiku runs quite well under many virtualization environments. (There are even directions on how to run Haiku in virtual environments here: https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/virtualizing/) Of these environments, Haiku has “guest additions” for Virtualbox and VMWare, however I believe the Virtualbox guest additions are partially broken.

As for Haiku hosting other systems, Haiku may only deliver decent performance for legacy systems like DOSBox, Bochs, and Sheepsaver. There is a QEMU port, however, there is no accelerator for it on Haiku, so it many run other systems quite slowly.

2 Likes
7

Unfortunately, VirtualBox guest additions are currently broken and are not available in HaikuDepot at this time. I hope to find some time and motivation to revert the recipe to an older but working state.

2 Likes
8

I’m using Haiku via VirtualBox on a MacBook. It works just fine, only the cursor becomes sluggish at higher resolutions? (Here I have to tweak the host configuration.)

9

VirtualBox with Haiku is currently broken and unusable. The Guest Additions are not working as mentioned. GPU works but has glitches. Mouse is not working well at all (random mouse jumping and random phantom clicks, it’s nigh impossible to reach the menu button).

10

Mouse works ok if you use USB Tablet as pointing device:

image

2 Likes
11

For the glitches, use 16 bits colors instead of 32 and let us know if it is better.

12

USB Tablet seems to help. Would be interesting to know why the regular mouse support does not work though.

13

Probably some syncing problems in PS/2 mouse driver only noticeable in VirtualBox.

14

I run Manjaro Linux on a 2.9GHz 2-Core CPU and installed Haiku last week in Virtual Box, Gnome Boxes and qemu+virt-manager.

The best experience by far is on qemu+virt-manager. It is very stable, with no crash and only 20% CPU overhead on the host OS. It runs full screen 1080P seamlesly out of the box in qemu.

The only drawback is that audio is stuttering when I play MP3s, youtube videos or Avi/wmv files whatever player I use, even though CPU is not 100%.
I tried different audio interface in virt-manager to no avail so far.

15

If there are problems, make bugreports and maybe someone will investigate them!

16

Does uncommenting

serial_debug_output

in /boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/kernel make any difference?

17

Nope, no difference noticeable, still stuttering.

but thanks for helping anyway.

18

Could you try beta1 and see if you still have stuttering?
Release kernels are compiled with lower KDEBUG_LEVEL and that could affect sound, see:
https://git.haiku-os.org/haiku/commit/?h=r1beta1&id=6db6c0b2

19

Audio stuttering is still present on beta1 64bit, but on beta1 32bit it is barely noticeable.

Btw, the 64bit nightly works flawlessly on bare metal (intel NUC N3700 @1.6GHz), so the problem is specific to the qemu install.

I’ll try the 32bit nightly tomorrow.

Thanks again for your help.