From the screenshot: "Processor: 0 MHz"
Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V
51–60 of 89 posts
Re: Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no technical reason one could not port Chromium or Firefox at this point; it's simply that nobody has put the time in to do it (as you can imagine, porting a web browser is not an easy task.)
There's 600+ patches needed to build chrome on BSD, and upstream is constantly churning, which means they need maintenance. Upstream refuses to import anything related to BSD support, so they need to be maintained out of tree. And this is for a much more popular set of projects. "Not an easy task" is a bit of an understatement.
The demise of TenFourFox is relevant: http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox... .
Re: Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems more likely RISC-V will displace ARM on the low-end where margins on things like licencing are the tightest. There are already high performance ARM designs for servers in particular, and that's more applicable to desktops than any RISC-V chip currently available. X86 will give them both a run for their money but it no longer seems completely obvious that everything hefty will still be running on x86 five or…
Do you think adversarial country relations specially from sanctioned countries like China and Russia might count in favor of Risc-V development and adoption?
I cannot comment on Russia, not an area I am familiar with. But I believe that is already the case with China.
An industry planning organization in China has indicated the plan to standardize on RISC-V across the board, with domestically designed and manufactured processors. The intent there is, I'm guessing, to disentangle China from any IP issues, or supply interruptions should trade be disrupted. Chinese media has openly stated as such, for example this article from Sina.com (in Chinese): https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/2021-01-18/doc-ikftssan7728...
Since it gives me reading practice, I've done a quick and probably slightly butchered partial translation:
Could expanding RISC-V be the cure to China's shortage of ICs?
In April of 2020, RISC-V Foundation's CEO sent an email alerting the Foundation's members. The email stated that "We have now established the RISC-V International Association in Switzerland".
The RISC-V foundation, which has been established now for five years, was originally founded in America. On account of worries about being influenced by political factors, it has moved to Switzerland, a country well known for its consistent neutrality and practice of supporting open source.
[...]
Over the last three to four years, in China's technology circles, more and more people have been discussing the adoption of RISC-V. This follows political factors having an increased influence on the science & technology industry, as well as ARM being purchased by NVIDIA. China's technology companies are ever more worried that the x86 and ARM architectures, in the hands of American organizations, may cut off from access in the future.
In contrast, the open source RISC-V does not have similar concerns. "Regarding domestic Chinese companies, the relocation of the RISC-V Foundation's official headquarters to Switzerland is a very favourable development." said CEO Xu Tao of Saifang Technologies, a domestic Chinese manufacturer of RISC-V processors. "Most significantly, this means that the adoption of the open source RISC-V instruction set, open source software, and public standards can be utilized without any fear of unforeseen complications. It's my belief that this is an opportunity to establish the independence of IP for Chinese processors."
Re: Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Rendering a GUI can be done in real time on ancient CPUs. That depends on the style of GUI. As soon as you introduce any amount of animation (even something as trivial as drag-and-drop, never mind touch-swipe or touch-zoom gestures), hardware acceleration can be quite useful.
> As soon as you introduce any amount of animation (even something as trivial as drag-and-drop, never mind touch-swipe or touch-zoom gestures), hardware acceleration can be quite useful. Didn’t Windows XP (and prior) not render the window as it was dragged, but just a dashed box? And when you release the window, it’d be redrawn in the new spot.
XP rendered the window unless you had a few settings switched (or the classic theme on).
Re: Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V
#55Haiku is ideal for embedded graphical systems, since it’s designed as a single user low latency unified system. As the technology stack is unified (from the higher level user space to low level kernel), with a unified desktop environment, unified IPC mechanism, unified file system, unified audio and media system etc, it allows system builders to make lean embedded applications and tools. Case in point - the Medo medi…
> Haiku is the ideal system for a Risc-V embedded device (think car console, tablet, media centre, info kiosk etc)
Haiku predecessor BeOS was present in yet even smaller version (BeIA) on embedded systems and Internet appliances [1] so kinda ahead of the times already.
Re: Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, as someone who uses Haiku casually I find the absence of a beastly browser to be a feature. There _is_ a browser, one featureful enough to read Wiki and such, but not featureful enough to blow away hours and hours on Javascript-heavy social web applications.
That's interesting but GP points out that major applications like > car console, tablet, media centre, info kiosk etc would be possible but hard without a mainstream browser. Sure, one can develop a native application, but this is not how mainstream development is done these days. E.g. info kiosks basically are browsers that display whatever there is on a (frequently updated) server, and so there's zero maintenance f…
There are plenty of companies that make desktop apps. Car consoles (generally) don't use browsers. I am sure that those applications would get on just fine without running Chromium. A car with a web browser is a nightmare.
Re: Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Rendering a GUI can be done in real time on ancient CPUs. That depends on the style of GUI. As soon as you introduce any amount of animation (even something as trivial as drag-and-drop, never mind touch-swipe or touch-zoom gestures), hardware acceleration can be quite useful.
> As soon as you introduce any amount of animation (even something as trivial as drag-and-drop, never mind touch-swipe or touch-zoom gestures), hardware acceleration can be quite useful. Didn’t Windows XP (and prior) not render the window as it was dragged, but just a dashed box? And when you release the window, it’d be redrawn in the new spot.
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Re: Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no technical reason one could not port Chromium or Firefox at this point; it's simply that nobody has put the time in to do it (as you can imagine, porting a web browser is not an easy task.)
> as you can imagine, porting a web browser is not an easy task I would imagine, but now I'm trying to figure out why; do they really use that much API surface? Network access should be simple enough, they need audio, keyboard input, and a canvas/surface to render to, but what else?
HW accelerated audio/video encoders/decoders (eg for WebRTC), mic, camera, crypto, ...
Re: Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As soon as you introduce any amount of animation (even something as trivial as drag-and-drop, never mind touch-swipe or touch-zoom gestures), hardware acceleration can be quite useful. Didn’t Windows XP (and prior) not render the window as it was dragged, but just a dashed box? And when you release the window, it’d be redrawn in the new spot.
XP rendered the window unless you had a few settings switched (or the classic theme on).
In fact, dragging a window in XP was the quickest way to see if hardware acceleration was properly enabled.
If you saw the window tearing while being dragged, chances were installing an extra driver would make the user a lot happier.
Re: Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haiku is lacking full featured web browser like Chromium or Firefox. They do have some basic browser available, but its capability is very limited.
Honestly, as someone who uses Haiku casually I find the absence of a beastly browser to be a feature. There _is_ a browser, one featureful enough to read Wiki and such, but not featureful enough to blow away hours and hours on Javascript-heavy social web applications.
also, no Electron apps. all I see is upside