Haiku OS on RISC-V making progress

There are some mightily cool things happening with Alternative Operating Systems nowadays.

Case in point: Haiku OS.

Not only has this open source reimplementation (and expansion) of the legendary BeOS been rapidly gaining in terms of both stability and usability (and availability of software)… but is now seeing extraordinary progress in being ported from x86… over to RISC-V.

The primary developer of the RISC-V port, a dev who goes by “X512”, recently had this to say on the Haiku OS message board:

“Haiku with “riscv” platform is running on Qemu. The same “haiku_loader.riscv” and Haiku disk image is working with both TinyEMU and Qemu. “efi” platform is not ready yet.“

Followed by some additional fantastic news:

“Network operation is confirmed in Qemu“

Check those links for some truly drool-worthy screenshots. Sure. It may look just like Haiku running on x86 platforms… but the fact that this is running, at that level, on RISC-V is pretty marvelous.

An open source operating system. One that is not Linux or BSD based. Running on an open standard CPU. Doesn’t get much more exciting than that.

Oh. And a little birdie tells me that Haiku Beta 3 is due to be released real soon now…