[openbeos] Re: openbeos Digest V8 #114

Hi,

Nicholas Blachford wrote:
> FYI: I know this area is interesting to ARM because I happen to work for 
> them.  Having followed Haiku from the beginning and being a BeOS user 
> before that it struck me that it's an ideal OS for such devices, more so 
> than the likes of Linux.

Concerning the "potential", maybe you're right. But I am afraid it will 
take more than just the port to the architecture, although that's a good 
start. ;-)

> This is the open source world, it's not about assigning developers to a 
> task, it's about developers scratching an itch.  I was asking if anyone 
> had that particular itch.

Understood.

> My opinion on the focus shift was that yes, it was a bad move but they 
> really had no other choice.
> At the time Be couldn't even *give* BeOS to PC vendors so they jumped on 
> a potential market which never played out.

The worst thing about it is that they managed to convince quite a few 
bigger application vendors to devote resources into ports and shortly 
before those where ready, here comes the Focus Shift. From what I 
understand, it wasn't just Nuendo.

> Anyway, I'm half considering doing the ARM port myself... I'll need to 
> start reading up on the Haiku kernel, anyone got any pointers where I 
> should start?

Now *that's* the spirit! :-) I don't know if there is much material about 
the subject although some material may be at <www.haiku-os.org/documents>. 
The code should hopefully be well structured and there are some people 
around with porting knowledge: Francois Revol is working on the M68K port 
right now (mmu_man in #haiku), Ingo Weinhold had worked on the PPC port at 
a time, Axel Dörfler of course and Travis (gheist), who wrote the NewOS 
kernel, is also pretty helpful and usually around in #haiku. The best 
approach may be to eventually get network booting going for short turn 
around times, if your device supports it. Axel and Ingo can probably help 
you best with that.

Best regards,
-Stephan

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