[haiku-development] Re: Gathering info on ownership of ARM dev boards.
- From: Ithamar Adema <ithamar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2015 11:31:58 +0200
Hi Richard,
Sorry for the late response...
On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 3:26 PM, Richie Nyhus-Smith <richienyhus@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I have done a bit of requirements elicitation [1] on the trac wiki, namely
on ARM microarchitectures.
Or in other words, I am trying to gather information such as developer
ownership of ARM development hardware, so we can work out which devices we
should try to target. It will also be helpful for people who are looking to
buy an ARM board, but want to get one that is more common among Haiku
developers in the hope that it will be supported sooner.
Okay, I see you did quite a bit of work, and that's definitely appreciated.
However, I think it is quite early for the Haiku/ARM port, and at the stage
that we are at (and have been, for a _long_ time), I think a simple table
of SoC vendors and their chips would be much more useful. Thing is, there's
(less than?) a handful of developers that ever seriously work on the ARM
port, and with the speed that it is progressing, whatever board is
currently in use might be unsupported before we have user land properly
booting on any board. We're pretty much at the start where the kernel boots
up in minimal setup, and what is needed is more support for one or more
SoCs, without even looking at the boards they are running on ;)
I think if you look at your list, there's only a couple of SoC vendors
(Allwinner, TI, Freescale, etc) with SoC families that share a lot of the
internal peripherals.
Basically, the ARM port is currently a developer hobby project, and I don't
think any end-user should be making purchasing decisions on ARM boards
based on the _current_ support, unless they intend to help developing the
port ;-)
Sorry if this sounds harsh, I really like the enthusiasm that people have
regarding Haiku/ARM, but there is a boat-load of work to do to even make it
remotely usable for anyone.
Regards,
Ithamar.
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