Like make I have a laptop that has 16 bit OS support kinda like 32 bit and 64 bit were there a unique feature to both, Haiku is known for being lean, but a 16-bit version could theoretically run on extremely low-power, vintage, or embedded hardware with minuscule RAM footprints, reviving machines from the early 90s or 80s along with A 16-bit, stripped-down system fits in very small storage, providing a “clean” environment free from the “bloat” often associated with modern 64-bit systems, While modern systems emulate 16-bit audio and graphics, a native 16-bit environment can offer perfectly timed interaction for specialized legacy audio/visual hardware that depends on specific 16-bit clock cycles and lastly many modern 16-bit microcontrollers (MCUs) are still widely produced because they are cheaper and smaller than 32-bit versions. A 16-bit Haiku could bring a consistent, high-level API to these cost-effective industrial and automotive control systems.
16 bit means you have at most 128 kilobytes of memory.
Haiku is a thousand times too large for that.
I suggest you pick another starting point, where you don’t have to start by removing 99.9% of things just to make it fit. Because after you do that, there will not be a lot of “Haiku” left in it.
Okay, well 32-bit computers are versatile because they are designed to be backward compatible. If you have a 32-bit machine, you can choose between a 32-bit operating system or a much lighter 16-bit one, depending on your needs. A 16-bit OS is like a “stripped-down” version; it uses way less RAM and fewer background processes, making it feel incredibly fast on old hardware and because it supports modern features like Virtual Memory and multitasking, but it can still run those lighter 16-bit apps if you need them. Essentially, 32-bit hardware gives you the best of both worlds: the power of a modern system or the lean efficiency of a classic one and 16-bit OS like FreeDOS is incredibly lean, often using less than 1 MB of RAM for the entire system. This leaves the rest of your hardware idle and cool, which is perfect for legacy games or low-power tasks, and haiku having 16, 32 and 64 bit compatibility help the environment and could allow people to use these, A standard 16-bit OS is stuck at 1 mb of ram and up to 16 Mb However, by running in 32-bit Protected Mode, the OS can use 32-bit pointers to address up to 4GB of RAM.
Also thanks for replying to me and it nice to meet you
What about running 16 bit OS on 32 bit hardware as 32 bit hardware are backward compatibility and more lightweight OS that take up barely any space would be nice, especially if someone already has a very weak 32 bit computer
Again, 16 bit OS is not about Haiku. It is not possible to natively run Haiku on 16 bits without full rewrite and making new OS from scratch that looks like Haiku.
Oh, I think I understand it now, what about not making a whole OS around it and just having the ability on the 32 bit OS version to run haiku at lower bit rates as a fun experimental feature
So far (from my point of view) 64bit is the main target for the Haiku developers (correct me if I’m wrong), to some extend ARM() and RISCV(*), 32bit even has a lower priority, why even talk about 16bit?
I guess the idea sounded better in head, and I got so shocked to see a OS that still give 32 bit support and make it priority to keep it up to date, Yet alone give it a unique feature like a BeOS compatibility
Didn’t say it is lacking behind, but the main focus (still .. MPOV) tends to move to 64bit, going 30 years back in time doesn’t sound appealing to me (but hey, that’s just me)
With that, I still think it would be possible to run some 16bit code on 32bit (maybe even 64bit?) given it’s background.
But you will never run Haiku on it. FreeDOS is the best you can hope for and even a lot of FreeDOS apps and utilities are now written with with DOS extenders like CWSDPMI that require a 386 or better CPU.
If you’ll forgive me for nerding out a little? In my defense, this topic is clearly unproductive anyway; might as well have fun.
Nitpick: a 16-bit CPU and OS isn’t the same as a 16-bit address space. If anything, it was 8-bit CPUs that had 16-bit addressing, meaning they could see at most 64K of RAM all at once, or 128K with banking. The 8086, which was definitely 16-bit, in fact had 20-bit addressing (to simplify a lot), which as pointed out above let it access up to 1MB of RAM. Ironically, modern 8-bit CPUs like the Zilog eZ80 have 24-bit addressing, so they can access a whopping 16MB of RAM, or as much as my old 486 had.
Haiku Beta 5 currently needs 256MB of RAM to boot up at all. That’s 16MB squared. The difference is literally an order of magnitude – in hexadecimal.
In my opinion it would be interesting to have modern, useful operating systems able to take advantage of an eZ80 (perhaps like a souped-up SymbOS); but Haiku is not the answer. Alas.
Yes, and this theoretically leaves a tiny chance for supporting a 16-bit CPU, or at least pretend to. There’s an interesting beast, Motorola 68012, this CPU (as well as 68000 and 68010) is often called 16/32-bit processor, because it uses 32-bit registers, but has a 16-bit external data bus. What’s more interesting for us is the CPU uses 31-bit address bus, allowing it to address 2GB of flat address space. That doesn’t mean there ever was a computer with 68012 CPU and RAM amount enough to run Haiku, so even if 68012 port is implemented Haiku could only run on a 68012 emulator.
But that’s just about dealing with the memory requirements. There’s more than that, like presence of an MMU: Helping on m68k | Haiku Project , or CPU tick counter: Haiku on 486? - #6 by VoloDroid . So no, porting Haiku to a 16-bit CPU wouldn’t be an easy task at all.
