Progress on running Haiku OS on VisionFive 2 RISC-V dev board | Hacker News Reader

Progress on running Haiku OS on VisionFive 2 RISC-V dev board

discuss.haiku-os.org

141 pointsnixcraft20 comments

Amazing progress, especially for a single-person effort. X512's posts (linked from https://github.com/X547/Haiku-riscv) are well worth a read - can't wait to give it a try. The sources to the VisionFive 2 port are not uploaded so far.

Haiku already runs great on the HiFive Unmatched board, the VisionFive 2 version now makes it possible to run Haiku on a RISC V machine which sells below $100 (+display, keyboard, mouse, case). I would expect that the effort to port the OS to the Pine64 Star64 board (which uses the same SoC as the VisionFive 2, the JH7110) is relatively small, so there's another option to run Haiku soon.

Don't forget the PineTab-V, available for preorder now, delivery "late May". No doubt very compatible with the Star64, but in a 10.1" tablet with detachable keyboard.

As a BeOS main-driver from the mid-1990s, I absolutely adore this.

BeOS was just a dream to use back in 1997-1999. The performance was absolutely spectacular (by the end I was running it on a dual PIII-450MHz, a very rare high-end configuration at the time) and the vision of a multithreaded OS that targeted multiprocessor (SMP) systems with the slogan “One Processor Per User Is Not Enough!” was truly visionary.

Haiku is really very usable - I'd encourage everyone to try it out under qemu at least. It has a Windows 98-ish / Linux early 2000s feel before things got complicated and unusable.

Yeah, I ran it bare metal on a laptop for a while and the only thing that really killed it for me is that Haiku is mouse-heavy and 1. I don't like that, and 2. that laptop had poor mouse input.

I worked in a little local computer shop back in those days, and remember putting together dual processor desktops that we sold as our high end machines. Were those PIII's the old slot type by any chance?

It appears from the Wikipedia page that the early Pentium IIIs were in Slot 1 format.

Yep, the slot-based PIIIs (that were Slot 1 just like the earlier PIIs).

Here’s a photo of my motherboard with the processors mounted in their slots: https://imgur.com/a/2fI8qNs

From the top, doesn't the first PCI card have a fan within the rightmost heatsink?

Does the 2nd PCI card block the fan?

I think that was the GPU’s heatsink in an AGP2X slot. I was probably an ATI Rage Fury or whatever it was called at this point.

I wasn’t very ‘into’ optimal airflow: early days. The PCI card was probably a PCI soundblaster: AWE32 or something like that.

Super cool, thanks for sharing. Brings back memories.

I remember buying a specific Tyan motherboard with 2 Slots, so I could get SMP under BeOS (& Linux) eventually.. with a Socket->Slot converter.

There is also some discussion in the VisionFive2 forum @ RVSpace.

https://forum.rvspace.org/t/progress-on-running-haiku-on-vis...

BeOS had a feature where you could clone a whole install to a different drive, at that time it was amazing. Instead of backing up and restoring or adding a new mount point, you just cloned your whole OS to the new drive, rebooted, and bam.

Nice! I'm very pleased running my visionfive2 as a gateway to my home network. But that itch to make it so something interesting and not useful is starting again.

Maybe Haiku OS would be a good for a network bastion?

Networking in haiku wasn’t that sophisticated last I tried it on actual hardware.

Haiku isn't intended as a server OS. It has solid networking (contrary to what another poster wrote), and you _might_ be able to run a cut down version of it as a server OS, but that's going way out of the normal use case for the OS.

How do you think that it wouldn't perform? Aside from generalizing. Is there some issue that needs to be overcome?

BeOS had pretty much no concept of users and process segmentation. Basically anybody who can enter a password has unrestricted access to everything and all programs can run with equal privileges, à la DOS/Amiga/macOS_classic/Windows9x. This is fine for a workstation (maybe?) but definitely not suitable for hosting server applications and daemons that you want to be run in restricted security contexts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com