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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

Still no Raspberry Pi images, though. Massive missed opportunity, I think.

While I understand the disappointment regarding new platforms and hardware support, current number of Haiku contributors is relatively small considering the list of things to attend to. Please consider contributing, every small bit counts: https://www.haiku-os.org/community/getting-involved/

It's opensource though, I'm certain they would accept your contribution if you port it.

I wonder if a Raspberry Pi port would be a "low effort" way to attract more developers.

I'm not claiming that such a port would be easy, but that the Raspberry Pi represents a relatively stable platform. Rather than having people turn away when they discover that component X of their PC is unsupported, they have a path where they can boot the image, try it out, and learn how to develop software for it. While this probably wouldn't address the issue of kernel/driver development, it may help to address application development.

Current ARM porting effort can be tracked from this forum thread: https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/my-haiku-arm-uefi-port-progre...

Don't complain. Send patches.

I don't interpret parent's post as a complaint so much as an observation: Raspberry Pis are incredibly affordable little computers that are seemingly a good fit for Haiku since they have relatively little diversity of hardware to deal with (outside USB devices of course), would benefit from a less bloated Desktop, and little otherwise is expected of them. Lots of people have various Pi models laying around in want of something to do with them, and lots of people would like to play with Haiku outside of a VM, so I agree with parent that it seems like a missed opportunity.

As both a Haiku and RPi fan, I agree they would be a great combination. RiscOS has run on the Pi since the first model, and if that combination's performance is anything to go by, Haiku would likely run circles around Linux on Pis.

The problem, as others have said, is the lack of dedicated manpower. This is one of those situations where I wish I was a developer, I'd dive right in and try to get Haiku to daily-driver stability on the platform. There is work being done on porting to ARM already, and my hope is that as the X86/64 platform matures, focus can shift to ARM and the Pi specifically.

I think its very disingenuous to call the lack of hardware support a "missed opportunity". There is a Pi port in progress but the Pi as a platform outside of Linux is a mess. Its not a well documented SoC and does weird stuff like boot via the GPU using a binary blob and other proprietary crap. It also has a different DMA architecture so drivers developed originally for PC hardware need to be modified. Ironically its a not very open source friendly SoC.

Not everyone is a programmer.

They're smarter by focusing on RISC-V imho.

The future, rather than the past.

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