[haiku-development] ARM Port

Hi all,

I've been following Haiku for years now, since I loved BeOS and found it far
better than any other OS out there - and I can't wait to see a stable
version of Haiku. I come from an embedded background, and having been a keen
user of PSION devices for years, which managed to do web browsing, word
processing, emails, etc with astonishing responsiveness using 36MHz, I
really appreciate well written software and can't stand the bloat-ware that
is so prolific these days. 

Anyhow, I've heard rumours that there might be an ARM port of Haiku. Has
someone done some work on this yet? I would be happy to help, though I think
I have a bit of a learning curve - although I am an experienced c/c++
programmer and also know some assembly for PIC/AVR/ARM archs, and have also
developed Linux device drivers and have a good understanding of hardware, I
have never gotten into the proper inner workings of a kernel and don't know
too much about it other than the driver side of things. I am also not
familiar with haiku and this 'pervasive multi-threading' sounds a bit scary.

So I don't have a lot of free time, but if you can give me any pointers for
where to start I'll start having a poke around. I will be buying a pandora
(google open Pandora), which uses an OMAP3530. Would the ARM port aim to
support old processors (e.g. StrongARM, PXA-255, i.MX21)? One problem at the
moment is that I can't actually boot Haiku or BeOS on my desktop machine,
though I'm not really sure why (I didn't try that hard). The Zeta live cd
works, but only if I disable a lot of things in the start up options. I
guess for development I would need some sort of cross compiler running in
BeOS/Haiku/Zeta and an ARM virtual machine, or a sort of cross-cross
compiler running in Linux and a virtual machine?

Best regards,

Ed Robbins.

Control Systems Engineer
Remote Handling Group, Joint European Torus
Direct Line: 01235 464498
Office J7/3B

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