Haiku?

[Catch23]

Has anyone heard of the Haiku OS? (www.haiku-os.org) It is an open source reproduction of BeOS, source and binary compatible, and improves on BeOS. BeOS was an OS that was written by a company called Be Incorporated, from about 1994 to 2001, and was designed with desktop multimedia in mind, way ahead of it's time. Be Inc. is sleeping with the fishes unfortunately, but Haiku is well developed now (after 7 years of work), and has ports of most familiar open source software, e.g. firefox. It is also rediculously fast and responsive - the maximum bootup time you can expect, even on a pentium 2, is about 9 seconds, and 99% of programs start in a fraction of a second. There's no waiting for the start menu to open, or for that window to finally realise you told it to close. And it's beautiful to look at.

Basically, I can't think of a better choice for an OS to run on Pandora. Of course the UI will need some work, as it's designed for a desktop, but the UI for Linux/Pandora needs some work anyhow. And porting apps isn't too much of a pain either.

At least one of the Haiku developers intends to work on an ARM port in 6 months or so, when the first release of x86 Haiku is ready. I am a C/C++ developer with experience in Linux kernel drivers, real time systems, and 3D, so I have offered my help, but have relatively little spare time to work on it and am not entirely sure where to start - but when my Pandora arrives that might just be enough encouragement! Is anyone else interested in helping it get off the ground? Coders are needed!

What do people think about Haiku as an OS for Pandora?

 

[maciek_urbanski]

If it's not Linux-compatible (is it ?) at the API level it means that a large number of developers would have to switch OS, re-learn APIs and do lots of porting...
That's a helluva lot of people to swing to new OS. Not mentioning that OS AFAIK has never worked on ARM (yet).

So I vote no. (Haiku seems very nice OS, though :wink.

 

[Catch23]

It has similarities to Linux, and is POSIX compliant which helps the porting... but there obviously are different APIs or at least differences... GUI toolkits for one thing will be completely different. One of the nicest things about it though is that it only has one way to do everything... one GUI API/'toolkit' for example, everything is unified, which is very at odds with Linux. Haiku trys to choose the best way rather than letting you choose which of 10 different options is best... and it's very good at getting it right!

It is a lot of work to port to ARM, as you say there isn't a port at all yet, so it obviously can't be the one and only OS for Pandora at this stage (could never be done for shipping date!) - But I asked what people think of it as AN OS for Pandora, not THE OS! It could be a very nice alternative for the future...and it will get more performance out of the same hardware. GUI programs will need re-writing significantly, but OpenGL, SDL etc will be exactly the same so many programs (e.g. games) won't have too much trouble, especially if they aren't using standard toolkits (Qt, GTK etc).

I'm certainly not against using Linux, which I consider the next best option and is here, now, today. Linux is my day-to-day OS of choice for many reasons, but once Haiku is complete for PC I am sure I will switch, it seems a much better desktop OS, and I'd prefer to run the most efficient OS possible on the Pandora as well...

Basically, this isn't a project to immediately be used on the Pandora... I want to see if anyone would like to help port it so that in the future we can have an even better OS for the Pandora and other Pandora-like machines! If people were too concerned about the effort of porting programs over to another OS we might not have Linux at all today!

I appreciate what you're saying though and thanks for the comments. And nice initiative on the SGX hardware BTW, very useful, both in general and for writing a Haiku graphics driver!

 

[Pleng]

I would personally love to see Haiku on the Pandora one day. The big problem I see with any alternative OS, though, is the fact that the GFX driver is not open source, and therefore it could not be ported to any alternative operating system. The same is true of the WiFi chip, but at least the Pandora people have access to the chipset documentations so could theoretically create a driver for an alternative OS.

 

[darkblu]

yes, i'd love to see haiku running on the pandora. even without some of the devices supported initially - in time they all will be.

fun fact: originally, beos was written for a proprietary box running 5 (five) processors - 2 hobbit cpu's and 3 DSPs for maximal 'multimedia' (gosh, i haven't used this word in a while) performance. only later it was ported (or shall i say migrated) to the powerpc, and eventually, intel. currently, there's a mc68k haiku port in the works, afaik.

you can read about the history of the original bebox and early beos here:
http://www.bebox.nu/history.php

 

[Loon]

Haiku looks very interesting, thanks for the link catch23.

However I'm not sure it's ideal for Pandora but it looks like a worthy project to install it on an old PC or laptop. Might well give it a go.

 

[Svartalf]

What do people think about Haiku as an OS for Pandora?

If you could get the technical information for the GPU, DSP, and WiFi/Bluetooth devices, I'd say, "why not?".

Unfortunately, you will not and unless you can make a compelling case to Imagination Technologies, TI, and the WiFi suppliers for this or for Haiku drivers, you're dead in the water overall because you'd be leaving the sound, 3D support, and wireless lying in the dustbin to do Haiku. This also supposes that an ARM port happens. The official x86 version isn't even done yet. I'm not going to tell you no on this one, but I don't think it's a good investment of resources with this device at this time.

 

[CTLance]

I love BeOS. I'd be all for a OpenPandora Haiku.

Porting Haiku to OP is a task of gargantuan proportions though, even without writing new drivers.

I'll never forget that advertisement video with the movies playing on the OpenGL-rendered book (youtube: part 1 part 2 - skip to 3:40 to bypass the marketing blabber and introductions). That whole presentation was absolutely stunning for the time.

 

[Catch23]

If you could get the technical information for the GPU, DSP, and WiFi/Bluetooth devices, I'd say, "why not?".

Well, the GPU is being worked on in another thread...and it would at least work unaccelerated anyway...plus the Haiku team are working on, or at least thinking about, a system that will allow Linux video drivers to be used in Haiku, though that's probably not for binary drivers....

The wifi and bluetooth I know nothing about...it seems strange that chipsets were chosen that do not have freely available hardware documentation, though I'm sure this has been discussed elsewhere. It is even more true for bluetooth, as most bluetooth devices are pretty simple and can even be used over a serial port using a standard protocol. Many wifi chipsets have open source drivers that have been reverse engineered as well, and again there is already a Haiku interface for Linux network drivers.

AFAIK, documentation for the DSP _IS_ available, but certain codecs (that are software that runs on the DSP) are not.

This also supposes that an ARM port happens. The official x86 version isn't even done yet. I'm not going to tell you no on this one, but I don't think it's a good investment of resources with this device at this time.

Well, there's only one way to make the port happen And speaking for myself, we are talking about new resources...it's not like I would be doing much else that would benefit Pandora with my time or 'resource' Of course I understand that many people have higher priorities, but for those who don't...

Porting Haiku to OP is a task of gargantuan proportions though, even without writing new drivers.

Well, I'd say yes and no there...it is a lot of work...but perhaps not as much as you might think, and there is the Linux-OMAP port to guide us...AFAIK (which may be a bit incorrect as I've always looked at Kernel land from a drivers perpective only) you basically need to cover system initialisation, memory management, interrupt initialisation and handling, and of course drivers, which can also be 'yoinked' from Linux, plus some other stuff, and a boot loader, for which the Pandora one may be suitable (uboot I think). I haven't actually looked into the Haiku sources yet, but I hope they have seperated out architecture dependent code...I'm sure they have (they are _very_ smart guys after all)

The main person who has looked into this already, François Revol, is also the guy responsible for the m68k port, which he has done singlehandedly! What's really stopping me getting my hands dirty at the moment is that gcc/binutils is not ready for Haiku/ARM yet...and I'm not knowledgable enough about compilers to have a decent go at investigating that - François will look into it at some time but if anyone else has the skills please shout now!

fun fact: originally, beos was written for a proprietary box

Yeah, I'd love to get my hands on a BeBox! Doubt there are many around though!

 

[Zor Prime]

We seem to be operating on the assumption that Haiku is based on Linux which it is not, it is based on a forked NewOS kernel.

Would I like to see Haiku on Pandora? Absolutely, but I'd like to at least see Release 1 completed for x86 first.

edit: after thinking about it, it would be cool to see Haiku on Pandora period regardless which arch it gets completed on.

edit2: there's some juicy ARM tidbits if you search haiku's freelists message archive.

 

[Catch23]

We seem to be operating on the assumption that Haiku is based on Linux which it is not, it is based on a forked NewOS kernel.

That's very much not the case, but the Linux sources for OMAP are a very good source of hardware information for Pandora. And haiku can use Linux network drivers (or was it FreeBSD?). There are also (somewhat vague) plans to make a layer to use Linux graphics drivers in Haiku.

Would I like to see Haiku on Pandora? Absolutely, but I'd like to at least see Release 1 completed for x86 first.

edit: after thinking about it, it would be cool to see Haiku on Pandora period regardless which arch it gets completed on.

The port can happen side by side with the x86 version, as most of Haiku is ready now! Although, some of the driver stuff might change, I _think_ the architecture dependent code is finished, so the actual port to ARM would not cause issues.

edit2: there's some juicy ARM tidbits if you search haiku's freelists message archive.

Some of the mails are from me! But it's probably clear I'm no Haiku expert, or BeOS for that matter. I used to use BeOS and I've followed Haiku development quite closely for some years and have it installed, but know next to nothing of the actual code, either the kernel or the user-space APIs (yet ).

 

[Zor Prime]

I'm no BeOS or Haiku expert either. But I did buy BeOS R5 back in the day w/ the BeOS Bible package, and a few of Be Inc. bare motherboard clipboards which were ultra-cool. (still are!)

Only thing that kept me from using BeOS primarily was I couldn't play Windows based games ...

Seeing an OS load from BIOS on a K6 266MHz computer in 6 seconds flat to desktop (HDD no longer accessing either) was just completely pimp. And ultra responsive, like the damn UI already knew what you were going to do before you knew what you were going to do. lol. Really loved the filesystem also, could kill that puppy whenever and have no faults and get right back to where you were ... in about, 6 seconds.

Anyway ... Yea, Haiku would be very cool on Pandora.

 

[cb88]

io follow haiku pretty closely....

this is what I know...
They are waiting for galium3d to stablilise before starting accelerated graphics
there is an m68k port in progress
they would probably also be interested in an arm port due to the beagleboard

It is not nearly as fast as BeOS (considering the videos i have seen and I have nearly identical HW with 8x the ram...dual PII 300mhz the BeOS demo machine was dual 266mhz i think) and uses a good deal more ram.... I have compiled the x86 version of haiku (I don't think the m86k port even gets to the desktop yet) and it has high ram usage and is sluggish compared to linux that is why it is still considered pre alpha at the moment... on the upside I think the BFS implementation might be maturing and they have an R1 alpha release coming up sometime soon

I hope they can get ram useage down to around 16mb (Like BeOS) whereas the recommend at least 64mb right now

Also the main reason it is currently sluggish is that it has a very ineffiecient process manager as far as what i have heard and plans are to improve and replace it