Another month, another Haiku activity report – this time for September. It’s another big one, but if I had to pick one thing to highlight, it’d be this one:
Some initial work for ARM64 was completed by kallisti5. This includes setting up the Haikuports package declarations, writing the early boot files, and in general getting the buildsystem going. Jaroslaw Pelczar also contributed several further patches (some of these still undergoing review), providing the initial interrupt handling support, and various stubs to let things compile
kallisti5 did some work on 32bit ARM as well, cleaning up some of the code to better match other platforms and preparing the reuse of EFI for ARM and ARM64 (as u-boot now implements an EFI interface, which would make things much simpler for our ARM boot process if we manage to use it).
Haiku has been working on ARM support for a while now, and while it may seem like a weird niche distraction for such a small project, it actually makes good, future-proofing sense to spend work hours in this area. ARM is definitely growing in the laptop space, and it makes sense to prepare Haiku for a future wherein ARM laptops are readily available.
On top of that, adding support for architectures other than your main one aides in finding difficult to spot bugs, ensures architecture-independent code, and in general is just a fun thing to do for a specific kind of person.
Getting Haiku ready for modern SBC’s sounds like a viable option.
It’s been an ongoing low level effort for over 10 years…don’t expect fully working ARM port to just appear anytime soon. So no not really viable until something starts actually working on another platform.
ARM has the disadvantage also of a complete lack of standardization.
“ARM has the disadvantage also of a complete lack of standardization.”
And it is under heavy fire from RiscV and MIPS (since they went royalty-free).
Good thing Haiku has a RISC-V port and a MIPS port as well. Patches welcome! 🙂