Is it appropriate to post questions on this forum regarding third-party porting attempts of new operating systems? I’d like to get Haiku running on my Cubox i4P and with open-source Etnaviv graphics drivers for the Vivante graphics core on Mesa it appears to be hopeful.
In case you are not familiar with Haiku, it is a fast, single-user, multithreaded, open-source operating system. It’s based on the programming APIs of BeOS, the OS from the BeBox from back in the 90’s. It performs well on 1 GB of RAM so even with UMA graphics it should perform at a fair pace.
The only system limitation of the Cubox i4P that concerns me is the potentially outdated UBoot flash image. Haiku prefers UEFI firmware on AArch64 units.
Thanks for reading this topic and I will welcome a response even if it critical. Third-party OS support is why I shelved my Cubox for an ODroid XU4 several years ago. I’d like to get some use out of the Cubox.
Perhaps I should look elsewhere for information. I couldn’t find used ones like I thought I’d be able to do.
We have good mainline support for the iMX6 based CuBox in u-boot and linux. In general it looks like you just need to follow the directions here Compiling Haiku for Arm | Haiku Project and then if things work properly you can submit a pull request to their github to include the required firmware binaries.
The CuBox i4P that you have is armv7 so will rely on u-boot and device-tree.
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Thanks! I was only able to find 2 Cubox machines on eBay so that’s why I was changing my mind about which machine to port to. I could have described the situation better.
I had already looked at the page you linked but it’s good to know about the uBoot support.
Thanks again.
Wait, ARM7 was 32-bit I thought. The Raspberry Pi 2 was ARM7 also. Since the Cubox i4P is advertised as a 64-bit CPU, wouldn’t that be an ARM8?
CuBox i4P is based on the iMX6 which is 32-bit. Our newly released CuBox-M uses the iMX8M Plus which is Cortex-a53 a 64-bit SOC.
I stand corrected. Cortex A9 is indeed an ARM7 family CPU.