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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

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.

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as far as i can tell, the whole point of haikuos at this point is "fun". as pointed out e.g. at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)#Criti..., haiku will never be a "mainstream" os. it seems plausible to me that riscv enablement is more "fun" than figuring out how to mangle crappy proprietary drivers enough to barely run.

The Haiku community was quite resistant to the idea of supporting the Pi, a resistance which was only partly technical in nature.

These days I would say it is essentially a matter of focus. Considering that the Pi 4 is a tiny little beast hardware-wise (certainly good enough to run as a light desktop, which is what I use it for), Haiku would be amazing on it, but I just don’t see it happening (if it was meant to be, it would have come about by now).

I think there are several reasons and my understanding is probably mostly wrong. First, the original port was using Uboot and then the focused shifted to uefi. Around the same time efforts shifted from a port to raspberry pi to use fdt and support for arbitrary boards. This should give a more flexible solution with the downside being less focused development.

The risc-v port probably benefited from the work stated above and stayed focused on a particular board.

It looks like it has almost leap=frogged past the PC port as well. (A cheap shot but it does not yet boot on my PC and I wish it did.) I have bought dedicated hardware to run interesting systems before; but feel like I am over that; low volume systems are expensive and stock PCs are cheaper and faster. I can see the attraction of RISC-V though, hope it takes off.

Price and availability is my guess. I still have no idea how a $35 SoC like the Pi is profitable.

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.

they're in bed w broadcom. also think of all the additional bite people end up buying to run em

Perhaps. But this means Broadcom propagates itself the adorably right way, beneficial to everybody. Also note "all the additional bite people end up buying" is mostly made by other parties, often small indy businesses. E.g. I have bought a 3D-printed chassis suiting my needs from a local vendor (and they also offer the source model and customization on demand).

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