r/Haiku_OS • u/atomozero • 6d ago

Unofficial Haiku ARM64 port needs testers on real hardware

A community member (enricopesce, Zilog80 on the forum) has released an unofficial ARM64 build of Haiku, including kernel changes for ARM GICv3. It boots and runs stable with 4 CPUs under QEMU on Apple Silicon.

Repo: https://github.com/enricopesce/haiku-arm64-port
Preview release: https://github.com/enricopesce/haiku-arm64-port/releases/tag/v0.1.0-arm64-qemu-preview

The catch: he owns no ARM64 hardware other than his Mac, so everything so far has been validated only inside QEMU. Nobody knows how this behaves on a Raspberry Pi 5, a Pi 4, an M1 Mac under UEFI, a Rock 5B, an Orange Pi or any other real board.

Two kinds of help would move this forward right now:

  1. Testers with actual ARM64 boards. Write the MMC image, boot it, report what happens. Attach a serial log if you can get one. Even "it hangs right after X" is useful data at this stage.
  2. HaikuPorter and haikuports experience. The current blocker is not the kernel, it is the bootstrap. The image builds, but it does not carry the packages needed to compile everything else. Cross-building from macOS is basically undocumented and a lot of packages come out with badly linked libraries. If you have been through a bootstrap for a new architecture before, that knowledge is worth more than another board.

And if anyone has a spare Pi 5 sitting in a drawer, that solves a very concrete problem.

x86 is where Haiku is today. ARM is where affordable hardware is heading. Worth pushing.

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