
Haiku booting in UEFI mode - return_0e
https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/jessicah/2016-12-15_uefi_progress_update
======
foxhop
When I was at SCaLE 11 conference a few years back I had the pleasure of
learning about haiku from one of the creators. He was demoing "big buck bunny"
in HD on some really tiny and underpowered hardware.

As a comparison the had builds with other operating systems and they could not
compete, they ran very choppy, like 3 fps.

I suggest you try it out. It's refreshing to tinker with an OS that is so
fundamentally different. When I went home I installed it on a few machines I
had, which were collecting dust. Tinkering with haiku sort of reinvigorated my
original wonder of computing from when I as a kid, for a couple months.

Later at the conference, I was helping at the Python booth, and I asked if
haiku supported Python. The haiku guy was not sure but he got it to compile
and run about 4 minutes later, and it worked!

~~~
rasz_pl
That only means one person was able to implement hardware video decoding while
others didnt, nothing to do with OS itself.

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waddlesplash
Actually, Haiku doesn't have any hardware video decoding. It's all software.

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sdegutis
That sounds miles slower.

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zamalek
You're missing the point entirely, it _could_ be done in hardware (I'm sure
they would be happy with a PR) - but Haiku can do stuff in software that other
OSes simply can't; media is just one of the better demos. It follows very
strongly from the BeOS demos from the mid 90s[1].

[1]:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ)

~~~
voidz
Most of us get your point, I'm sure. :-) Some people just go against
_everything_ in their comments.

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Panino
I have Haiku running on an old Pentium 4 laptop. It's definitely worth a look!
Just a few notes after booting it up just now:

    
    
      * Connected to my site via TLSv1.2/ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
      * Played a Youtube video just fine
      * Was able to git and build libsodium, via the installed gcc 2.95.3
      * wget'd an h.264 mp4 file and watched it via MediaPlayer
      * OpenSSH 7.1 (newer Haiku ISOs may include a more recent release)
    

Haiku isn't my daily driver, and I think the security model is increasingly
out of touch, but it's worth a look and I wish the project well. Check it out.

~~~
waddlesplash
The default build of Haiku is dual-GCC, you can switch to GCC5 by typing
"setarch x86" in any shell.

And the security model can't be helped if we want to maintain binary
compatibility with BeOS - once we (mostly) drop that, we'll switch to
something more sane in that department.

~~~
benley
How long do you expect to maintain BeOS binary compatibility? I see in the
trac roadmap that R2 is slated to be the deprecation point; is that still
likely to be multiple years away? Has there been talk of an abi compatibility
layer that would allow the kernel to move forward independently from the
legacy platform?

Sorry if these are repetitive questions btw. I'm just curious.

~~~
waddlesplash
Exactly how long is unclear; however, post-R1, we intend to stop prioritizing
it, and if it does stay around, it'll be secondary to continued development.
There's been serious talk of actually branching R1beta1 on January 31, so,
hopefully soon.

The kernel already has moved pretty far forward. BeOS audio drivers, for
instance, don't really work anymore in favor of our new multi-audio API (I
don't think anyone had any use for BeOS audio drivers; we merged all the open-
source ones, I think), the VFS layer has gotten major upgrades, we rewrote the
thread scheduler and removed the 8-core limit we inherited from BeOS, and
already have added ASLR and DEP support, among lots of other improvements. I
think the only thing at this point which actually is still compatible kernel-
wise are FS drivers (sorta) and graphics drivers (although of these, we have
more in-tree than BeOS ever did, so I don't know if anyone even uses old BeOS
ones anymore).

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rcarmo
This is cool to see. I'm a bit sad that the ARM port hasn't made any visible
progress - I remember back when the Raspberry Pi came out that there were a
few discussions about other hardware being more adequate/future proof, and now
that there's a quad core model it would be a great OS to run...

~~~
mhd
And the Raspberry Pi's GPIO connectors would take us full circle back to the
"Geekport" of the original BeBoxen.

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djsumdog
It had GPIO? I remember the videos that showed the CPU indicator LEDs on the
front panel.

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memsom
Yep. The geek port, as well as at least one midi port iirc. The geek port had
both analogue and digital I/O.

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Lio
From the website:-

"Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal
computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn
and yet very powerful."

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hyperhopper
That still doesn't say much. Why would I be interested in this over linux?

The FAQ doesn't even say whats good about it, just that it targets personal
computing, which windows and OSX would also say. Ubuntu too, probably.

~~~
jaclaz
You are probably too young to have tested in the good ol'times the original
BeOS.

It was IMHO a "revolution" that - for whatever reasons - never happened.

Don't ask me the actual "technical" details, but it was small, very, very
fast, even on the limited hardware of the time:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS)

I have no idea if Haiku is (will be) as faster as it was BeOS at the time
(when compared on the same hardware to Windows 9x or NT 4.00) when compared to
a "current" Windows or Linux or MacOS, but at the time it blew away any other
OS, particularly when it came to browsing the web or for music, video, etc.

~~~
ashark
For those of us who had the pleasure of using it, the fact that BeOS isn't the
dominant desktop OS is proof that we're not living in the best of all possible
worlds.

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qubex
I adored BeOS but I am not sure whether the single-user “wide open” lack-of-
security model it embodied was a path worth taking. Surely one can question
whether it makes sense to have purportedly multi-user UNIX-derived OSes on
single-user mobile devices, but...

~~~
jaclaz
Or NT based for that matters. Talking of PC's still today, some 20 years
later, more or less the only thing that may prevent unauthorized access from
an intruder with physical access to a machine is the BIOS password, anything
else is just something that may slow down him/her a little bit.

~~~
vertex-four
Err. All operating systems suffer from that problem.

~~~
qubex
No. Systems that rely on encrypted and signed credentials to perform login
theoretically do not suffer from that problem: case in point, the Windows SAM
had hashed that seem to preclude if limited to NTLM decryption save for brute-
forcing, which itself is curtailed by salting the hashes — but if those hashes
are removed by offline editing to the SAM, the system allowed access. A system
that did not allow removing the hashes because the file system is encrypted
and/or because signing made the tampering visible (itself evaluated by TPM-
style verification) would be conceptually not vulnerable to this line of
attack (implementation flaws notwithstanding).

~~~
vertex-four
Windows has support for full-disk encryption using a passphrase or physical
key. It also supports Secure Boot.

I don't see what that has to do with multi-user systems though. If your
argument is that we could have the Secure Boot system ask for the passphrase
and tie the entire box to a single user... then you're missing out on most of
the current point of multi-user systems.

The first is that many companies actually do have multiple people using the
same machines. Not at the same time, but at different times. This needs
auditing - i.e. a multi-user system.

The second is, again, auditing - when a system administrator runs a command on
a system remotely, they do it as their own user.

The third is security (combined with auditing) - various service processes get
run in different user contexts so that they can't mess with the user's stuff
unless they're allowed to, and they have their own user ID that anything they
do happens under.

Operating systems aren't built for home users, they're built for companies, in
almost all cases, and stripping out the multi-user framework would change the
OS to be unrecognisable. Just stripping out the authentication part doesn't
buy you much complexity reduction either.

~~~
jaclaz
We were talking of actual single user systems in practice, tablets,
smartphones and similar are usually single user devices and even in corporate
many laptops are used as desktop replacement by single employees...

~~~
vertex-four
You mentioned PCs originally, hence the confusion.

In any case, I believe Android uses the multi-user features of Linux as a
security mechanism (and building a new kernel from scratch might not have led
to Android being a major player - ARM companies already knew how to write
device drivers for Linux), although it could reasonably use an object-
capability system under a more focused kernel.

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chmike
We need more OS diversity. Putting all the eggs in the same basket is too
dangerous regarding security. I'm very impressed by the work of the Haiku
community.

~~~
the_why_of_y
Yes, putting all our eggs in the "POSIXy, monolithic kernel implemented in C
with MMU-isolated processes, ambient authority, shared mutable state
concurrency" OS basket feels unwise.

~~~
waddlesplash
Well, Haiku isn't _too_ different from that anyways. The kernel is very much
C++ and not C, and does have certain hybrid tendencies (it's a lot less
monolithic and statically linked than Linux is at least), but most drivers
still run in kernel space and the process model is very POSIXy, with most of
the other attributes you listed, as well...

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ktRolster
I have forever felt bitter about Haiku OS, ever since I realized they don't
write all their code comments in haiku form.

Sigh, so sad.

~~~
waddlesplash
We do, however, have a very nice collection of haikus about Haiku:
[https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/data/system/data/...](https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/data/system/data/fortunes/Haiku)
:)

(Although some of those are inaccurate these days - we've had OpenJDK for a
few years now, for instance.)

~~~
ktRolster
Can't you at least put _one_ haiku in the comments? Somewhere? Anywhere??

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Philipp__
Amazing! I was not around when BeOS was the thing, but I read a lot about it,
and it seemed way ahead of it's time, at least to me from today's standpoint.
I play with Haiku from time to time.

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Esau
Nice to see its development is continuing.

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ComodoHacker
Is it ready yet for any real-world use cases? Like torrent station/media
server or NAS or internet gateway.

