Another Haiku monthly activity report, but this time around, there’s actually a big ticket item. Haiku has been in a pretty solid and stable state for a while now, so the activity reports have been dominated by fairly small, obscure changes, but during March a major milestone was reached for the ARM64 port.
smrobtzz contributed the bulk of the work, including fixes for building on macOS on ARM64, drivers for the Apple S5L UART, fixes to the kernel base address, clearing the frame pointer before entering the kernel, mapping physical memory correctly, the basics for userland, and more. SED4906 contributed some fixes to the bootloader page mapping, and
runtime_loader’s page-size checks.Combined, these changes allow the ARM64 port to get to the desktop in QEMU. There’s a forum thread, complete with screenshots, for anyone interested in following along.
↫ waddlesplash
While it’s only in QEMU, this is still a major achievement and paves the way for more people to work on the ARM64 port, possibly increasing its health. There’s tons of smaller changes and fixes all over the place, too, as usual, and the team mentions beta 6 isn’t quite ready yet, still. Don’t let that stop you from just downloading the latest nightly, though – Haiku is mature enough to use it.
I am surprised the ARM port took this long. They had RISC-V up and running on real hardware back in 2021.
https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/kallisti5/2021-11-07_booting_our_risc-v_images/
Maybe the documentation for RISC-V is more accessible and there are less boards out there to support.
Like anything else it requires people interested in doing the work and the core developers are not interested in ARM. That’s not really surprising.