Have you ever want to follow along as someone ports an entire operating system to a new architecture? Well, now you can! Haiku developer X512 is porting the Haiku operating system to RISC-V, and is posting regularly in a long and detailed ongoing thread on the Haiku discussion forum, detailing his successes and struggles along the way.
He’s already quite far along:
Most things are working, system is quite stable. Now applications crash show error dialog instead of KDL. Also after removing no more needed workarounds (fully allocate stack memory instead of allocating on demand by page fault handler) memory usage was reduced.
It’s fun and informative to read the whole thread from the beginning until today, and see the progress unfold as if you’re sitting right next to X512.
I have been following the RISC-V port, and X512 is an amazing developer. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on at the moment in BeOS land. Not least that ARM is also getting some love and BeIA and BeOS PowerPC have also been discussed fairly recently. Lots of nostalgia. Also another thread details recreating a BeBox, including Blinkenlights.
Unfortunately Haiku is unrecognizable as BeOS anymore… its gotten so gnomeified and has some serious sunk cost fallacies going on with the design of recent additions.
I don’t see the gnomeification. But I do see that people are spending a lot of time on other things, like RISC-V is nice but you know, there actually system and software improvements Haiku needs first.
Its there… lots of dumbed down decisions rather than sane desktop defaults.
Also the whole package management system is an eyesore from start to finish.
The desktop looks like BeOS, which was built on simplicity. The package management was an enormous waste of time.
I like the package manager.
It’s a much better implementation than the way most Linux distros do it.
I don’t see how one guy scratching an itch and porting to RISCV takes away resources from other things that need working on.
Those other things wouldn’t have been done whether he ported to RISCV or not.
Can you give specific examples? Simply asserting “it’s there” doesn’t help me as a non Haiku user know what you are talking about.
Have you run Haiku lately? Must say that packamanagment was bad in the beginning but now whan I used to it and it was updated. It’s what other OS should do. No dependency hell (Where two app need two different version of the same library). I can at startup choose what version of haiku I like to start (if last update was a bad).
People would rather spend six months porting to a new architecture or developing a new package manger instead of spending 10 minutes fixing a ‘show stopper’ bug. eg. You can’t use an NDIS wifi connection out of the box with Haiku. Yet is just a few minutes work to fix. Absurd.
The problem is not every developer has the same interests, and nobody really gets paid to work full time on bug fixes.
Also.. NDIS, NDIS is garbage and always was. Haiku does have a few native wifi options, and most laptops these days have the option to change the wifi card to a compatible one…. this is a vastly superior solution to half assed NDIS support. I haven’t touched NDIS in over a decade good riddance!
Also in reply to Zane above… how is making most directories even many INSIDE the user folder read only a good idea? What should have been done instead was to make all areas read/write except for special read only packaged areas. Instead what was done was the exact opposite of that…. if you want to write into a special area you have to put it in a non-packaged folder INSANE!
@cb88
Yeah it’s a bit odd but I got used to it quite quickly.
Didn’t someone create a distro once that removed the package management system?
From a security standpoint, why is making them read-only a BAD idea? From where i sit, it seems like a pretty logical thing to do. Errant processes, malware or user incompetence can no longer FUBAR an install. And part of the whole “package manager” concept was to put packages in their own security sandbox, preventing
That’s a pretty big claim. Can you provide proof that the fix for NDIS WiFi would only take a few minutes, and if you can why haven’t you done it?
To be fair, X512 is not a Haiku developer as far as I know. He (I assume he is not a she) just took the RISC-V port on as an exercise off his own back. No one asked him to do it.
The issue with your comment is that you know there is an issue, but you are only willing to complain. Have you filed a bug report? Developers do things that interest them. If they don’t have bug reports, they do stuff like this, especially if they are not formal project members.
Yes that’s how things work if you don’t get payed, you work on what you like to fix.
But I do like to see that 10 min bug you are talking about..
Why use NDIS when we can use FreeBSD drivers? There was talk about NDIS drivers along time ago but I thing we went with FreeBSD instead.
I am very happy to see that haiku is running on risc-v .
This gives me reason to return back to haiku. Support for Vulkan (for any kind of amd gpu that can work with the si-five unmatched) would be my last wish. I bought the domain riscv64.com years ago with the idea of getting involved with risc-v 64 bit hardware. The perspective of being able to combine risc-v and haiku already brings me joy.
My gratitude to X512.
cipri
@Brisvegas
Are you willing to pay someone to fix these issues?