Progress on working Haiku on VisionFive 2 – OS
tqh summed up the issue very nicely. It’s not a lot lack of curiosity, however lack of time and ever altering {hardware}. I’ve through the years purchased a number of ARM units, and every of them grew to become out of date and probably damaged earlier than I may even get began on porting Haiku to it. I nonetheless personal a few of them, and perhaps I’ll get again to Haiku hacking on not less than one (the opposite is manner too previous and it could not make sense anymore to get Haiku working there, and the structure could be very unusual, 2 CPU cores of which just one has an MMU…)
There isn’t a drawback in any respect with it being a “closed” ISA (what does that even imply? That situation has been solved since not less than the 6502 cloning the ISA of the Motorola 6800 however swapping the CPU pins round so it wouldn’t be totally appropriate, or the z80 being a clone of the 8080 however renaming the mnemonics within the assembler so individuals would discover, however attorneys wouldn’t).
There have been issues with every machine utilizing an ARM CPU being primarily a very completely different structure, with a unique UART to ship debug to, a unique strategy to program the framebuffer, and so forth. Once we began, even the MMU wasn’t customary and was completely different between varied ARM generations.
Lately that is solved by having UEFI for all machines, that means we are able to get not less than the bootloader working on any machine with none new code. This advantages each RISC-V and ARM, since they’ve each standardized on UEFI, and consequently, the ARM port has began to make some progress once more.
So, TL;DR: it’s not an issue of closed ISA, however of lack of structure standardization for something however the CPU itself.