Did anybody tried Haiku on a Lenovo Thinkstation computer? I was thinking about doing some development work on it. Are Xeon processors supported in general?what about dual socket boards?
I have a ThinkStation P520c with Xeon W-2125 CPUs as my main machine, currently running Linux Mint. Never actually ran Haiku on it because it is powerful enough to run several versions of Haiku and other OS concurrently in VMs.
This thread prompted me to want to try Haiku on bare metal on the machine, but I have secure boot enabled and this prevents me from booting Haiku. I’m not motivated to disable it right now and then having to fiddle around with my Linux installation to boot properly again, but I’ll sure disable it when I’m doing some maintenance on the machine (OS update etc.)
In the meantime you can take a look at the BeSly hardware database if they have any information on ThinkStations and Xeon CPUs.
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Haiku supports secure boot, but you have to add our signing key to your efi.
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Thanks, good to know. Will try it 
Maybe a blog post about that would be interesting …
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Yeah that would be great. I only found a forum thread about secure boot basically explaining what @nephele wrote above, but without any details how to actually do it.
Yes.
I run Haiku for hours/days on multithreaded batch jobs…
Ah, yes, this is a good idea, I can use Haiku in a VM. What do you use for virtualization, KVM, QEMU, something else?
Also, how many cores can Haiku use? If you create a VM with 12 cores would it be able to use them?
I use VirtualBox, 6.1 currently. Be careful with the new 7.x versions, there have been reports of problems when running Haiku. Several people have complained about Haiku performance under VB in general but I’m happy. That’s what I’m used to and I can use it under OSX and Windows too.
Haiku runs well under several hypervisors, take a look at the virtualization guide for details. Virtualizing Haiku | Haiku Project
Will have to leave that question for the experts. I don’t know the limit of cores Haiku can utilize. If I remember correctly people on the forum have successfully run Haiku on systems with 12 cores. There have been discussions where people have reported that the multi-core performance in a VM is not as good as on the actual hardware. Don’t have any hard data on this one. My main Haiku VM has 4GB of RAM and 2 cores, which gives me sufficient performance for most tasks. Might be different if you are compiling large codebases, which I don’t do on the VM.
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AFAIK, that only applies to VirtualBox, and only for some versions/hardware combinations, where for some people assigning less cores to the VM improved the responsiveness. But for other people (like me), seems to work as expected.
Edit: perhaps I missed discussions regarding other VMs?
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QEMU/KVM is the most preferred virtualization system. VMware is also good. VirtualBox has poor performance with Haiku (there are some tickets about this, with a partial cause pinpointed, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense why things are not great on VirtualBox.)
Haiku currently supports up to 64 cores, and this is a soft limit we can change as necessary at any time.
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