An interesting article by Gian-Carlo Pascutto:
Of all the work needed to support the new hardware, porting Firefox to the 64-bit ARM architecture was not actually something we needed to do: we’ve supported 64-bit ARM on Android and Linux for years.
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Great, now they can port it to Haiku.
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The category should prolly be changed to Off-topic.
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Well, i’m not a developer, but an IT specialist…
…if I understood correctly, the “success” of FF have to deal with their FirefoxOS and/or (old) MacOS APIs.
…will Haiku-ARM run on Apple Silicon ?
Not yet. The ARM ports still have ways to go and RISC-V for now might get more attention.
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Yes, they basically had all the really hard parts already available: They had a ARM64 port, they had Firefox ported to macOS APIs for a long time and they even had previous experience with providing macOS universal packages (the app built for different architectures all inside a single app package) from the time were macOS moved from PowerPC to Intel. They “just” needed to bring this all together and adapt to some changes (still enough to do for something like Firefox).
It’s a very interesting read, thanks for sharing. But in regards to Haiku I think it doesn’t give much insight. Porting Firefox to Haiku is a different story all together. And making Haiku run on that hardware first and foremost requires porting to ARM64.
Errr… no, the implied “idea” - oh, well, “off-topic” now - is porting Haiku to Apple Silicon…
I think we already have a lot of ideas. That’s the easy part.
We need people actually interested in making things happen. Do you own this hardware? Would you donate it to an Haiku developer so they can work on it? Would you help running a crowdfunding? Would you work on the code yourself? If not, then your idea is worth nothing but a “yeah, wouldn’t it be nice?” comment. And nothing will happen.
We don’t have a port to ARM64 CPUs. We don’t even have a port to 32bit ARM. Even for Linux, the efforts to port to Apple hardware require a crowdfunding and a team of very experienced people. The hardware is completely undocumented. So, this is a lot of work and we have more important things to do (like, you know, supporting the hardware we already run on?)
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I know that this will be driven by developer interest… still, I can’t help feeling that an ARM64 port would be more useful, given the number of Raspberry Pi 4s out there.
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…and here we go:
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