Haiku OS on the Raspberry Pi?

[Val67]

Hi, I was wondering if Haiku OS (a fast OS that starts under 10 secs) could run on a Raspberry Pi. Haiku works fine with 128 MB of RAM and there is an ARM port in progress. Anyone know?

[abishur]

After some quick research, I can mostly confidently say no

The Haiku OS does not use the Linux Kernel, unfortunately this means that it won't be able to use the broadcom GPU chip.

Beyond that, I couldn't find any info on which ARM version it was going to be compatible with, so it's possible even if we could get it talking with the GPU, it wouldn't work with the processor (This issue is also present with Ubunutu's latest release).

Unfortunately, these factors are outside of the r-pi's team control.

[Val67]

Aww

[asb]

It could be made to run, though not easily with GPU acceleration. Use the graphics card as a dumb framebuffer, base other drivers on those distributed in the linux kernel for the Raspberry Pi (dwc_otg USB support is the big one, also SD card controller etc).

[Josh]

Running Haiku without Graphic Acceleration is painful... I learnt that the hard way.

[l8night]

Val67 said:


Hi, I was wondering if Haiku OS (a fast OS that starts under 10 secs) could run on a Raspberry Pi. Haiku works fine with 128 MB of RAM and there is an ARM port in progress. Anyone know?


Yes it could, (but the pessimists may have a point that it may not be practical).

BeOS quite happliy ran on a 500Mhz X86 with a non accelerated VGA card. but Haiku is not based on the same sources (its NewOS) based [afaik].

That aside, last time I checked there was no real Haiku port; I was interested in getting it running on my BeagleBoard.

It would take a bit of effort (and may be a jtag connector [tin can tools sell a cheap one I've used in the past]) to get the kernel booted and talking to a simple direct frame buffer and as it would be a new port of the OS you could use and ABI that was compatible with the GPU binary as our not tied (as the x86 port is) to the Beos ABI.

If you are interested then I'm trying to drum up some support on the Haiku Forum too.

[Loongson]

Hi,

With the great help of a student in the UK, and a little luck I have
a non-linux kernel booting on the Raspberry Pi.



Not a *huge* step, but just having some visual feedback is definitely a good start. The (messy) example below lights the "OK" led on the Pi by toggling GPIO 16 and then while(1)'s
We now know the boot process, and what the Pi is expecting for a kernel image.

http://pub.haikungfu.net/haiku.....upi.tar.gz

Enjoy,

[l8night]

I think you have gzip'ed the file twice, I had to do

gunzip haikupi.tar.gz

mv haiku.tar wrapped.tar.gz

gunzip wrapped.tar.gz

tar xf wrapped.tar

to get at the source.

that said Great work, if I ever actually get a Pi I'll try to help as I'm very interested at getting either Haiku or my own OS running on Pi (or beagle/panda board)

I'm not usually active here as I disagree with Liz being rude to ppl and some of the things Eben publicly backs (like no trading second hand games).

that aside I'm not going to say no to a 25 quid ARM board that does all the things I want for a tenth of the price it would cost me to make my own.

if there is a way to get a kernel that can be booted on a beagle board and a Pi then I can help now. contact me of forum if you want me to help.

[jamesh]

l8night said:


I think you have gzip'ed the file twice, I had to do

gunzip haikupi.tar.gz

mv haiku.tar wrapped.tar.gz

gunzip wrapped.tar.gz

tar xf wrapped.tar

to get at the source.

that said Great work, if I ever actually get a Pi I'll try to help as I'm very interested at getting either Haiku or my own OS running on Pi (or beagle/panda board)

I'm not usually active here as I disagree with Liz being rude to ppl and some of the things Eben publicly backs (like no trading second hand games).

that aside I'm not going to say no to a 25 quid ARM board that does all the things I want for a tenth of the price it would cost me to make my own.

if there is a way to get a kernel that can be booted on a beagle board and a Pi then I can help now. contact me of forum if you want me to help.


Why on earth did you have to put in the paragraph about Liz and Eben? Seems completely unnecessary. You have your opinions, but they really don't need to be aired in a thread on Haiku.

[l8night]

it was just explaining why I've not been active here since originally posting trying to find ppl to help me get a haiku port to ARM and had actually though I'd deleted (or had my account deleted) was very pleasantly surprised to find that some ppl are working on haiku-Pi

can any further off haiku topic comms be directed to me direct (not that I've any problem with anything I say being public) just that you are now turning what was a simple explanation of my lack of visiblity here into something else.

as for Hakiu, its great news and that should be the topic, as should working out if the broadcom video driver can be linked in and get a basic frame buffer working from a simple kernel.

[cheery]

You shouldn't call that 'haikupi', as it's one really simple kernel. But otherwise, well done! This will help me around about soon when I'm hooking UART to my rpi, so that I can try out code on the rpi without having to copy the code to the SD-card all the time.

We should definitely get some git project going on for example rpi kernels.

[jamesh]

l8night said:


it was just explaining why I've not been active here since originally posting trying to find ppl to help me get a haiku port to ARM and had actually though I'd deleted (or had my account deleted) was very pleasantly surprised to find that some ppl are working on haiku-Pi

can any further off haiku topic comms be directed to me direct (not that I've any problem with anything I say being public) just that you are now turning what was a simple explanation of my lack of visiblity here into something else.

as for Hakiu, its great news and that should be the topic, as should working out if the broadcom video driver can be linked in and get a basic frame buffer working from a simple kernel.


Sorry if you feel I was turning the topic - tbh I thought it was you turning the topic with your comments on Liz and Eben which have nothing to do with the OP. Hence my comment on it being a Haiku thread. Anyway, deeds done, it need not be mentioned again.

[mahjongg]

I would love to see Haiku (a GEOS re-write) run on the R-PI, just as I like to see RiscOS work. The more operating systems run on the R-PI, the more choice, and choice is good!

Linux is great, do not doubt that, but its not the do all and end all of operating systems.

Other more suitable to low end systems might do things simply impossible on a standard Debian based system.

So do be be disheartened by the notions that "Open GL ES", or "2D acceleration" is tied to the Linux kernel, that might be true now, but it might not be true forever.

That said, I do look forward to seeing puppy linux make an entrance in the R-PI world.

I do not presently own a R-PI, as I did foresee the hubbub that would ensue after the launch, so I decided to let real developers have a go at having one first.

Sometime in August, or so, maybe the "educational" release, will be early enough for me, why spoil the pleasurable anticipation, de "voorpret" as it's called in Dutch.

[l8night]

as I read it the Open GL ES support will be in an ELF library that is linked into the linux kernel, I see no reason why Haiku can not be build with the same GCC/G++ as linux (unlike the x86 Haiku which has to be build with an old GCC if you want beos compatibility)

I'm sure the first machine I ran beos on was a K6-333 with a basic VGA card and it was fine (as was linux in those days) Haiku on my netbook is vastly faster than linux was so I see no reason that It can't make the pi seem faster too.

if Your really interested in getting Haiku onto Pi the easiest route will be to get a qemu port working as everyone can use that whie waiting for thier Pi's (I'm still trying to track down enough info to make a qemu bootable image from scratch, and finding a GCC (might use my sheeva plug or panda board GCC's for now)...

[Narishma]

mahjongg said:


I would love to see Haiku (a GEOS re-write) run on the R-PI


Don't know if it's a typo, but Haiku is an open source re-implementation of BeOS, not GEOS. GEOS is an older OS / graphical interface for 8- and 16-bit computers.

[JoeStrout]

Looks like the last post about this was in 2012. Since then, the Raspberry Pi has become wildly popular... maybe even popular enough to make the Haiku team quit holding their nose when they talk about it. In my view, the RPi could be the killer platform for Haiku (and Haiku could be, in at least some ways, the killer OS for RPi).

I poked around a bit on the Haiku site, and found only this page discussing an "extremely early port of Haiku to Raspberry Pi."

Has anybody here tried this? Is there a SD card image somewhere we could just download and boot? I'd love to give it a try, but I'm not sure I'm up to building it from source myself.