Oh no.. Haiku on a Phone (or Tablet)

Welp. Theory confirmed :slight_smile:

  • USB 3 Hub attached via USB C adapter to OnePlus 6t
    • Haiku ARM64 minimum-mmc written to a usb drive plugged into hub
    • USB Keyboard
    • Make sure everything plugged in on power-on.
  • Boot phone, boot Haiku:
    • Manual: fs2: , cd EFI/BOOT , BOOTAA64.EFI
    • Automatic: click “UEFI OS on Device #7” within EFI bootloader

I’m afraid without serial output debugging will be… difficult. Sorry for the video quality, it’s hard to capture the screen of a cell phone without an OS running on it.

To be clear, i’m probably not going to work a lot on this (too many projects, etc) figured it might be motivation for someone to take a crack at it though :slight_smile:

9 Likes

Here’s the device tree for the device:

Looks like we need GICv3 Interrupt Controller support for ARM64. We only have GICv2 today.
https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/18596

2 Likes

I know it’s about Haiku on Phones 2 :))

but sorry,

as Android tablets just some kind of

bigger or

giant phones

practically …

… Can a Samsung Tab S9 be a target as well ? :star_struck: :wink:

The only real requirement is an UEFI bios environment. That’s what really opens the doors to booting Haiku. (and why seeing Renegade made me go “huh, I wonder if we would work there”)

Unfortunately most consumer devices are targeting Android / Linux kernel in a really closed / proprietary way.

Find an ARM64 tablet with a UEFI implementation (Tianocore like Renegade, or u-boot) and Haiku has a somewhat reasonable chance of trying to boot on it.

3 Likes

Thanks. Seeing the possible devices … I understand all above.
Well, it was just a faint, shallow hope for a usable mobile Haiku (tablet) device.
As HW the Galaxy Tab S8/S9 Ultra is an attractive device for me as a used one in the future.

This way I should turn to other, non Android, but Windows based, non ARM, mobile devices to check out for such purposes.

The main reason I had not spent a lot to an Android device the same – not possible to easily install an alternate OS after Android support had run out or I want to replace it.
Also I hate that previously when I had one … an another machine needed to upgrade to a newer version of Android.
I do not know how it goes nowadays - at last time I had Android with a 4.4.x.x versio. It had not upgraded just updated, but I would have a Windows PC with installed Sony SW to execute the upgrade - this way I used it with the original version. I’ve just updated the OS on it with OTA - using WiFi.
Now I have a different financial situation … so no fancy new goodies on the table. ;-))

Anyway , it was interesting – against the sobering reality :-j

Nice story BRO!
We still have a long way to go. The phone market is shrinking, more and more small companies are going bankrupt, the largest will remain.

Might also be worth looking into Tow-Boot as well as common firmware for ARM. It tries to be consistent feature-wise across supported hardware and has an interface for configuration. Tried it out on a PinePhone and it works rather well.

With regards to debuggability, perhaps targeting the PinePhone line would be a good idea? Their 3.5mm jacks can be set to serial with a HW switch and usable with a USB adapter. I do want to try and boot Haiku on a PinePhone and see how far it goes, what needs to be done to do this?

1 Like

I think the problem will be more on the GUI side than on the kernel side. Phones are just smaller computer, so the hardware programming is the same or very similar, but the user interface conventions, not so much.

I guess let’s see if we get the kernel to run, and then we can talk about what to do with the GUI (if anything at all)?

And probably needs better power handling than haikus.

2 Likes

At least with USB-C becoming prevalent on phones now, the GUI can prolly stay the same when an external display is plugged in. As for a mobile GUI, there have been prior discussions in another thread:

Agree. However, it shows that the compatibility of our ARM64 port is already pretty strong. IF someone could find a nice ARM64 Android tablet (Maybe one with a pen input), and that has a UEFI bootloader, the use case is a lot stronger.

I have a nice Samsung Galaxy tablet, the blocker is no UEFI bios ports yet :wink:

Interesting, though their target devices seem to be more “single board computer” targeted.
To be clear, you’re on the right track though. Any complete UEFI implementation on a device should allow Haiku to at least attempt to boot. ARM, ARM64, RISCV64, doesn’t really matter.

u-boot or Tianocore are two pretty common “full UEFI implementations”

1 Like

For UI and other things, you could pre-test on the Surface Pro series (UEFI, Intel).

Also, the Galaxy Z Fold5 (SM-F946U) has a nicer screen layout than the regular phones. But, the cost factor…

PineTab has both ARM and RISC-V variants, but has no pen input. There is also the PineNote with an included pen, but it uses an E-Ink screen. All of them can be used with UEFI.

OOF. I wish I knew about the PINETAB-V a few days ago. I just bought a Clockwork uConsole RISC-V to play with, but the specs of the PineTab are a lot better for the same price :frowning_face:

Someone should pickup a PINETAB-V for Haiku…

Quickly sold out so I can’t get a one :frowning:

Ahoy @kallisti5 ,

I edited the title … to better cover the discussion here.
I hope it is no problem to changed so; the addition at the end clarifies when and where possible to probing the installs and development -
IF anyone would like to do so …

2 Likes

Oh yeah, didn’t mention it here but two months or a bit łater ago I tried compiling the ARM version and putting it on my EDK2’d Microsoft Lumia 640 LTE. Haiku didn’t get detected but the bootloader started and seeing that was awesome enough, Though with the controls freaking out a bit there and in GRUB2 I’m not 100% sure about that EDK being fully working, apparently boots Linux but farthest I got was a kernel panic - granted I didn’t and still don’t quite know what I’m doing

1 Like

This stuff - from @tqh -

… later may help you out !..

I suggest to start to keep on tracking it … :j

I have an ARM tablet, Toscida, a problem for Haiku would also be an Internet connection via GSM (using a SIM card). I look forward to hearing about progress with ARM on Haiku