Haiku makes huge progress on RISC-V support
Booting to desktop. Full USB support and everything.
In super exciting “Alternative Operating Systems ported to Alternative CPU Architecture” news: Haiku OS is now booting, to a functional desktop, on a RISC-V computer.
That’s right. The open source reimplementation of BeOS (Haiku) is now running, to a fairly advanced degree, on an open source RISC-V CPU.
The developer of this piece of technical wizardry (known as “X512”) posted the following picture if Haiku in action, running on the VisionFive 2 RISC-V board:
Now, before you get too excited… this isn’t quite ready for prime-time yet. According to the developer, it requires jumping through a number of hoops in order to get it booting.
“In addition to Haiku image written to NVMe I also used U-Boot on SD card from default Debian. Haiku EFI boot loader is located on SD card. U-Boot do not want to run EFI boot loader from NVMe (or I am doing something wrong).”
That’s some serious hoop-jumping.
So, as of this moment, there is no ready-to-go images of Haiku on RISC-V. But this is a massive step towards seeing that happen.
This initial work is being done specifically with the VisionFive 2 board — with the code available on GitHub — which is powered by a RISC-V CPU up to 1.5GHz, and up to 8GB of RAM.
But much of this work can likely be applied to other RISC-V based systems in the future.
Which is a pretty exciting prospect. Imagine running a truly unique, open source operating system on a truly unique, open hardware RISC-V platform.
The coolness factor is off the charts.
Want to make sure you get every article and podcast? Be sure to be a subscriber to The Lunduke Journal of Technology. Here’s a few other articles you might be interested in:
So many reasons to subscribe to The Lunduke Journal of Technology. Nerdy articles & podcasts every week. Plus…
A dozen eBooks — Monthly PDF Magazine — Premium Videos
Other handy links:
Just imagining a future with Haiku running on the PineTab-V...
Since they barely have Linux running properly, how cool would it be that Haiku became the de facto standard because they beat Linux to full implementation.