Hot on the heals of yesterday’s summary about recent Haiku news, we’ve got a big one – Haiku’s desktop running on real RISC-V hardware, the HiFive Unmatched.
I finally managed to run desktop. Crashes was caused by unaligned access to framebuffer, access seems to require 16 byte alignment. I made some quick hack to enforce alignment in app_server when copying to front buffer, but it currently introduce artifacts.
I don’t know why 16 byte alignment is required, radeon_hd driver works fine on Acer W500 tablet without alignment tricks.
This is a big milestone.
This is cool, but I can’t help thinking it would still be nice if a Raspberry Pi port were to be given as much love as this is atm. I understand that RISC-V is ideologically “better” than ARM (though as I understand it the graphics on RISC-V SoCs are still proprietary), but the price of the hardware is like 9 times higher, pretty much ensuring that this experience will be relegated only to the most hardcore hobbyists.
I think the development costs of RISCV are much cheaper than that of the RPi, simply due to the open nature of RISCV. It’s much easier to implement an OS when all the drivers and firmware is open-source than trying to build wrappers around proprietary blobs and implementing drivers from scratch from esoteric documentation
Actually you should be able to use radeon graphics on some of the faster SiFive boards … Rene Rebe has gotten OpenGL working on Linux as of a few days ago (he hasn’t released the code yet as he’d like to get paid for the work).
Of course Haiku’s own radeonhd driver should work…