[HN Gopher] HaikuOS running on RISC-V hardware (HiFive Unmatched)
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       HaikuOS running on RISC-V hardware (HiFive Unmatched)
        
       Author : iamnotarobotman
       Score  : 163 points
       Date   : 2021-07-17 18:57 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (discuss.haiku-os.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (discuss.haiku-os.org)
        
       | edvinbesic wrote:
       | Are there any Pi/Nuc style boards one could get to run this on?
       | I'm an old BeOS user and would love to have a little device to
       | play with for nostalgia.
        
       | qwerty456127 wrote:
       | This is awesome but this is a rather strategic move. Hopefully
       | RISC-V boards will emerge and this will become practical. Today,
       | however, a RaspberryPI port could make more sense.
        
         | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
         | It is strange to me that the RISC-V leapfrogged past the Pi
         | port (per https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/building/port_status
         | the ARM, including the Pi, _exists_ but isn 't very useful
         | yet); I wonder why it made progress so fast even with poor
         | hardware availability.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | gogopuppygogo wrote:
           | Price and availability is my guess. I still have no idea how
           | a $35 SoC like the Pi is profitable.
        
             | qwerty456127 wrote:
             | This can hardly be an obstacle in porting the OS. The board
             | is here, pretty polished, feature-rich, easily affordable
             | and available.
             | 
             | Obviously the HaikuOS developers have just found RISC-V
             | easier and having more potential. Or somebody just has
             | sponsored the effort.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | johndoe0815 wrote:
       | This is an amazingly fast progress, can't wait to try it on my
       | Unmatched board... and the port is more or less still the work of
       | one or two persons IIRC.
        
       | Htoioinan wrote:
       | up
        
       | eric__cartman wrote:
       | It's always nice to see the wonderful advancements the HaikuOS
       | devs make. As an operating system it's very nice and fun to use.
       | It gives me the same vibes as old workstations from the 90s.
       | Although it still has a bit longer to go before it could be
       | considered as a daily driver for any useful assortment of
       | applications.
        
         | andi999 wrote:
         | I am very pessimistic. I think it would need a strong usp or
         | some killer app. Maybe going into hard real time direction
         | might allow it to live in a niche in audio and machine
         | operation console. But currently I don't see a path.
        
           | ozfive wrote:
           | This was the same argument for BeOS back in the day.
        
           | techrat wrote:
           | Realtime audio on hardware that isn't sold by Apple would be
           | quite a killer reason to use Haiku. Especially seeing Apple
           | is progressively abandoning the Pro, configurable market
           | again.
        
             | gjsman-1000 wrote:
             | They released a Mac Pro, as configurable as you could
             | desire, less than two years ago and have a replacement
             | already in the works. They aren't abandoning the market.
        
               | samatman wrote:
               | I agree with that for what it's worth.
               | 
               | People who aren't in the industry don't really realize
               | that the Mac Mini is the entry-level into audio
               | production for most people (iMac is the same for video).
               | It has just enough to get started, and when you're making
               | the big bucks the Mac Pro is in fact affordable for what
               | you get.
               | 
               | Developers only see MacBooks for so long that they forget
               | the rest of the product line exists, yet it's there for a
               | reason.
        
             | skavi wrote:
             | realtime audio and good color management are two things a
             | lot of people use macOS for..
        
           | kitsunesoba wrote:
           | If I'm not mistaken it already has a bit of an audience as a
           | replacement for old BeOS boxes in radio broadcasting.
        
           | nyanpasu64 wrote:
           | I've heard that Haiku's audio APIs are similar to those of
           | BeOS, which are harder to use than today's APIs. I hope they
           | can be improved though, if Haiku is a better foundation for
           | real-time media than standard Linux (or even realtime).
        
             | tialaramex wrote:
             | The BeOS Media APIs enshrine a strange way to think about
             | multimedia latency, which is _maybe_ useful if your central
             | idea is that you need to synchronise audio and video
             | through different production pipelines, but doesn 't serve
             | real time audio work at all.
             | 
             | I believe Haiku did eventually fix some of the most
             | egregious mistakes in their audio handling for example for
             | years if you played silence it made everything else
             | quieter, which is a classic goof+. But it's a long way from
             | ideal for this application. You can of course use
             | _anything_ , if your hobby is making music with Haiku,
             | knock yourself out, same with a ZX Spectrum or a toy
             | xylophone, but yeah, not ideal.
             | 
             | + How do I mix samples for N channels together? Adding them
             | together and dividing by N ought to work right? No.
        
             | viraptor wrote:
             | Since Pipewire, the Linux view on audio is changing a lot.
             | The latencies are not what they used to be. Even if Haiku
             | becomes more usable, it's unlikely to achieve a massive
             | difference.
        
           | agildehaus wrote:
           | Why does everything need commercial success?
           | 
           | It's survived for 20 years despite having none. It will
           | continue as long as there are interested developers.
        
         | qwerty456127 wrote:
         | There isn't much needed to make an OS usable as a daily driver
         | today. Just port Firefox.
        
       | amichail wrote:
       | BTW, TeXmacs runs on HaikuOS:
       | https://twitter.com/maxgubi/status/1235518013492740096
        
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       (page generated 2021-07-17 23:00 UTC)