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.
Well, except there's no accelerated graphics driver (for any device) :(
Rendering a GUI can be done in real time on ancient CPUs. This has been true since the 1980s and continues to be true today. If your app has a performance issue then you should consider cutting down on the animations/special effects/abstractions.
(I remember some early discussions in the forums where at first the Pi was dissed in favor of the BeagleBone, and then because of Broadcom, and then, later on, because of "lack of openness", so I'm chalking it down to a mixture of bias and a huge blind spot...)
* ppc -> risc-v binary translator, much more tractable with fixed width 32 bit instructions
* running this on an FPGA that already includes a RISC-V core like PolarFire and then instantiate a softcore PPC. hack Haiku to run the PPC processes on that core. Extra bonus points to dynamically instantiate PPC cores to meet load, make fast ones, wide ones, slow ones.
What a time to be alive!
That sounds like the Amiga PowerUp cards with extra steps. :D
This is cool.
I guess that new Apple M1 ARM would count but I have yet to get one.
I'm really excited about using an ARM based laptop at some point but not sure if the Linux stack will work on it. Is this the same problem lots of Mac software wouldn't run on the M1 at first?
Its not really any more usable as a daily driver on RISC-V than it was on any other architectures like x86, but RISC-V support is a milestone because its likely the applications where a very lightweight OS like HaikuOS would be most useful are things that would fit more into the "embedded" bucket than the "desktop computer" bucket - like others in the comments have mentioned, think media kiosks, display systems, hardware appliances, etc. For some perspective, BeOS was purchased by Palm (the handheld computer company) before that whole corner of the industry started dissolving in the smartphone era, so thats the kind of device it was being used on commercially.
(Also, RISC-V isn't ARM - your mainstream ARM laptop is probably going to happen especially now that Apple has shown they can sell well, but RISC-V is still ramping up towards that point of popularity.)
Next is the BeagleV "StarLight". It uses the same SiFive cpu cores but in an SoC from a different company, and with a built in PowerVR GPU. It runs off SD card, but once booted can use USB3 disks. At $119 for 4 GB or $149 for 8 GB it's not a lot worse of a computer than the Unmatched. Due to ship September, I have a beta developer board now.
Allwinner have their D1 chip in mass production right now. It has a single core running at 1.0 GHz with a draft version 0.7.1 128 bit RISC-V Vector unit, which improves the speed often 2-3x. Sipeed and Pine64 have promised Linux boards using the chip in the next couple of months starting at $10 or $12. Probably with only 256 MB or 512 MB RAM at that price. That's very competitive against Raspberry Pi Zero. I've had access to an Allwinner Evaluation Board for a couple of weeks and it's very very nice is they can get boards out at those prices.
All the above are 64 bit and run Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu (I recommend Ubuntu as they have 21.04 images for RISC-V) and others coming.
If you want a full featured desktop experience with web browser loading heavy sites, watching YouTube etc then you'll want the Unmatched, but the BeagleV will be close. Note: such a web browser isn't available yet, but once developers have these boards themselves as daily drivers it will happen.
While the Unmatched / BeagleV CPU is similar to a Pi 3, with more RAM and better peripherals (especially in the Unmatched) I expect the overall experience to be like a Core 2 Duo from the mid 2000s, maybe better for many things with a decent video card. Think: original MacBook Air.
I guess you can try it on Qemu. Might test it later. UTM offers "Risc-V Spike board" among others.
There is a download link in the thread for one of the test builds. It probably will not work on anything besides a VM, though.
Does Haiku features a serial console?
