[haiku-development] Re: ARM Port

> 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.

Hopefully the discussions around R1/alpha will get you hooked :)

> 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

The topic has been brought up several times.
I started adding support to gcc/binutils, but it's not finished, and I
need to clarify EABI stuff.

> 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.

It's really buzzword, using you usually don't even notice windows use
their own threads in simple code, you just use it.

> 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

My target for now is the Openmoko FreeRunner phone, for which an almost
complete qemu patch is available.
The profusion of different ARM versions won't help, but it should be
possible to make it generic enough.
The bare minimum requirement will be an mmu.

However, we'll be focussing on R1/alpha for x86 the next months, and I
have the m68k port to finish first :D

> 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?

You can build Haiku on either BeOS/Zeta/Haiku, or Linux/BSD/... (even
windows if you're insane enough).
For x86 gcc2 builds I tend to do it from Zeta, but for other archs it's
just simpler from Linux.

François.

Other related posts: