This post is really good,thanks.
I also wrote my opinion about ARM some weeks ago: ARM war ein Fehler!
It’s right that ARM is not a good platform and I really hope it won’t be the future of computing.
Its complete lack of standardization gives me headaches.
But ARM devices exist,I even use some (but I regret it and will buy more x86 again in future) and if we don’t try to support them as good as possible,Haiku will die together with x86 if it really comes to that point.
1 Like
I don’t like closed architectures any better than you do. Your article linked doesn’t describe why RISC-V isn’t better or worse however, so I’m only to assume that the supposed accountability between Intel and AMD is enough to satisfy you. Personally, I see WebAssembly as a way to bypass the whole instruction set argument altogether. Once it catches on outside the browser, I would hope somebody would write a custom architecture on a chip and port Wasmer to it rather than paying license fees to ARM or Intel. (Your post should have been in a separate thread, I think.)
1 Like
Lets focus a bit more on the port or the bounty?
Linux probably ran on ARM before UEFI became a open standard. It is not surprising they do something else.
UEFI is a step forward when compared to the alternatives.
It provides a standard, well documented and easy to work with. Except for device paths…
You get GPT partitions where you can have many partitions. (Extended partitions needs to go away)
You get a standard API so you can support many different SOC’s instead of doing a port for every SOC.
You get MS calling conventions and PE executables. Actually that is not so good 
And U-Boot was more focused on Linux booting and a moving target.
5 Likes
You don’t expect us to take this article seriously, do you?
1 Like
Not that I want to get in to another debate about this… the best hope for your dream is to write some Verilog/VHDL that runs WASM natively on a FPGA. That way, you don’t need a runtime. If that works, designing a chip is possible I guess. But having an FPGA emulate the processor is not the end of the world. Plenty of real world products emulate entire devices using FPGA’s, not least the MiSTer and the Analogue Pocket…
1 Like
Re:Custom Architecture instruction set
What? You didn’t see this one coming? 
I actually agree with you about FPGAs. Though the LLVM team is actually writing a new preprocessor language for System Verilog called CIRCT that should ease the process of new hardware core development significantly.
Re:ARM SoCs
I’ve got a PineBook Pro with a RockChip RK3399 in it. It’s an OK-ish laptop once you get over the fact that it runs Linux. Of course it is hardwired with its maximum of 4 GB of RAM so Linux is kind of a tight squeeze even running Manjaro ARM. I look forward to seeing Haiku or TheseusOS or any other lightweight OS on it.
I’m about to gift my RasPi 2B to my nephew for his birthday in May. He may learn my disdain for heavy Linux distributions on it with only 1 GB of RAM on a unified memory architecture SoC. It’ll be his toy though. I’ll help him learn to code in Python.
1 Like
I also have a PineBookPro. Its nice little machine but not very useful due to the fact thats its slow. But for some tinkering or Web,Email stuff its ok.
1 Like
BTW: FreeBSD gets currently a DRM driver for PBP, so that might be ported some day.
1 Like
Agreed about the slowness of the PBP. It needs an OS with better thread-affinity than ordinary Linux though. I have fair hopes to getting it a new OS to take advantage if its hex-core. If the dual A72 cores were really well designed on it, it would have been faster than a RasPi4. As it is… it’s still slow.
1 Like
I have a PineBook, and that thing is just about unusable. The PineBook Pro at least looks nicer. It would be awesome to have them running Haiku. A plus might be that the PineBooks have a serial output capability, could help with development once the ARM port gets to that point.
1 Like
I had a PineBook too. It was indeed unusable :DDD
I sold it for a few buck to a student that wanted to tinker around with it.
The fastest little ARM computer I got is a XU4-Lite. Its 32 bit ARM, but fast. Actually it was really usable to do some development stuff.
1 Like
The octa-core in my ODroid XU4 would welcome Haiku on it also! Currently I run streaming apps on my parents’ TV using the LineageOS distribution of Android 7.1 on it. If it weren’t for the general bulkiness of Linux and Android, a person could probably use it as a nice small-form-factor SBC.
1 Like