Please focus on other architecture like ARM or PPC

Dunno if someone is interested in or can help in any way, btw Asahi Linux (aka Linux on Apple’s M1 Macs) progresses/findings sounds interesting:

Constantly having to reverse engineer drivers every time Apple decides to re-engineer their SoC doesn’t sound so interesting to me regardless of the performance. To each his own, however.

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Psst… If anyone wants to contribute to Haiku, and also wants the arm (32-bit) port to progress, see https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/17309

That one would be a good opportunity for new contributors :wink:

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Thought it was decided a while back to focus only on AArch54 for ARM?

We still have a 32-bit arm port which is arguably still closer to functionality than arm64.
if the build doesn’t get fixed arm (32-bit) might get abandoned.

According to the project lead, Apple Silicon chips still hold some kind of compatibility between versions that go back to the original iPhone. He mentions that it would be a trivial effort to port possible future M-chip iterations in a very easy way, unlike all the other mobile implementations.

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I have 3 32-bit ARM SoC based SBCs but only one 64-bit AArch64 laptop. What would be needed to get the SBCs working? I looked at the code in the ticket and only noticed something about PCI Ecam, whatever that is…

Is UBoot sufficient as a bootloader? That’s what my Cubox i4p has though I suppose having custom flash for a bootloader could be repurposed if needed. I’m not terribly familiar with the SBC and SoC architectures used in these machines.

If the information is helpful, my other 2 ARM7 SBCs are a RasPi2 and an ODroid XU4.

Well UBoot isn’t very cooperative, in that it just gives a few infos before handing control to our loader, and can’t be called for extra stuff, like video framebuffer setup. This is one of the reasons it took so long to get ARM working, because we had to work around its limitations. But it’s still possible to boot with it, just not all platforms will have the boot splash or even on-screen debug messages. Some stuff is now handled with data from the FDT, and I think it should be possible to write external UBoot commands that could fill in the missing bits into the FDT in some way.

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Forgive my ignorance but which definition of FDT are you using? Field Definition Table? Fixed Disk Table? Formal Description Techniques? :slight_smile:

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Flattened Device Tree, prolly.

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It can be used as EFI loader. It can provide EFI GOP interface if driver is available. I managed to get GOP with u-boot on TinyEMU: My progress on real RISC-V hardware - #277 by X512.

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Yeah but that means porting the EFI payload to that hardware anyway…

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