this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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I feel like I've been following Haiku (and ReactOS) for a quarter of a century. I believe I even installed BeOS with Haiku components (I think they originally functioned as a set of addons to the final BeOS release) way back in the day.
You aren't alone. I remember BeOS 4 on my old Pentium II just screamed with that old ATI card. It's always deserved better than it got, and it's great to see the project has come so far. Especially adding resources for modern languages like this.
The one thing I think they're kind of sleeping on that I really wish I could find. Are versions of it compiled and packaged for a couple of popular SBC at least. I know they've got it running on arm as well as riscv. I feel like the Raspberry Pi and similar SBCs brought some attention and more relevance back to things like Risc OS. BeOS/Haiku It would seem perfectly suited to the towards an ecosystem like that. I'm sure it will get there someday.
https://github.com/X547/Haiku-riscv
Yep, its close. Hopefully we'll see some with better support for the hardware soon. Seems like with riscv many are waiting for rva23 hardware. Which we should start seeing any time now.
I am one of those waiting for RVA23. SpaceMIT claimed they would ship by the end of 2025 but that is seeming very unlikely.
To be honest, I am really waiting for Ascalon now (itself RVA23). Tenstorrent says they will ship a version of their own silicon mid-2026. And the guy that created AMD Ryzen says it will be about as fast as Ryzen 5. We will see what it costs though. This chip “exists” but nobody is manufacturing the silicon yet.
If you don’t care about the vector instructions, this is pretty tempting though: https://milkv.io/titan
But RVA23 will be so much more compatible going forward. I would expect all RISC-V software to work with RVA23 for a long time and for most RISC-V software to require RVA23 in 2026 and beyond. It is like when the Intel ecosystem went 32 bit. “386 compatible” was the standard for well over a decade acting as the minimum but also remaining sufficient.
I know RVA23 maps to x86-64v4 and you can still run plain old RV64I or RV64GC on RVA23 but you cannot run 32 bit code on it. So the x86 to x86-64 transition is not a perfect analogy. But you can run a standard Linux distro released in 2025 on Intel hardware released in 2005. RVA23 may be like that.
The difference is that Haiku is actually capable of being a daily driver OS at this point (for some people). It also installs on a fair bit of real hardware.
ReactOS is still a technology preview. It can host old software in a VM. Hardware support remains very limited.
That said, ReactOS has made a lot of interesting progress recently and getting their 0.4.15 release out after literally years of being stuck in limbo was a big step forward. They have started to talk about new APIs, new hardware support, and 64 bit. I think they got some new blood. Fingers crossed.