Compiling Haiku for Arm64

Haiku can be compiled for devices leveraging the ARMv8 64-bit processor architecture.

Please ensure that you have obtained a copy of Haiku’s source code as described in Get the Haiku Source Code if you have not already done so.

Create a Compiler Toolchain

Building the ARM64 compiler toolchain is quite easy using Haiku’s configure tool. For a complete list of flags for the configure script, see Haiku’s Configure Options

From the Haiku source directory, run the following to compile the build tools (be sure to adjust the options to match your build environment):

mkdir generated.arm64; cd generated.arm64
../configure -j2 --cross-tools-source ../../buildtools --build-cross-tools arm64

Building an MMC (SD Card) Image

Once you have a complete ARM64 toolchain, you can build a Haiku MMC disk image via jam -j2 -q @minimum-mmc This will generate an MMC image suitable for booting Haiku on real 64-bit ARM hardware devices or in emulators like QEMU.

Building raw disk images

It’s possible to build separate disk images for the bootloader and Haiku software. The image esp.image contains the EFI system partition with Haiku bootloader. The image haiku-minimum.image contains the BFS file system with Haiku kernel and software packages. These images are useful mainly for development purposes, when running Haiku in an emulated environment.

jam -j2 -q @minimum-raw esp.image haiku-minimum.image

Emulating Haiku

The ARM64 images can be emulated in QEMU with an EFI firmware like TianoCore or U-Boot.

Emulating Haiku with U-Boot firmware, using the unified haiku-mmc.image image file:

qemu-system-aarch64 -bios u-boot.bin -M virt -cpu max -m 2048 \
    -device virtio-blk-device,drive=x0,bus=virtio-mmio-bus.0 \
	-drive file=haiku-mmc.image,if=none,format=raw,id=x0 \
	-device virtio-keyboard-device,bus=virtio-mmio-bus.1 \
	-device virtio-tablet-device,bus=virtio-mmio-bus.2 \
	-device ramfb -serial stdio

The location of the 64-bit ARM TianoCore firmware will vary based on platform. This example is for Fedora, with raw images esp.image and haiku-minimum.image:

qemu-system-aarch64 -bios /usr/share/edk2/aarch64/QEMU_EFI-silent-pflash.raw \
    -M virt -cpu max -m 2048 \
    -device virtio-blk-device,drive=x0,bus=virtio-mmio-bus.0 \
    -device virtio-blk-device,drive=x1,bus=virtio-mmio-bus.1 \
    -drive file=esp.image,if=none,format=raw,id=x0 \
    -drive file=haiku-minimum.image,if=none,format=raw,id=x1 \
	-device virtio-keyboard-device,bus=virtio-mmio-bus.2 \
	-device virtio-tablet-device,bus=virtio-mmio-bus.3 \
	-device ramfb -serial stdio

Be sure to examine the uart console in QEMU for debug data from our bootloader / kernel.