Haiku OS boots on Apple M1 Macs, with rough edges

Haiku, the BeOS-inspired open-source operating system, has reached a milestone on Apple Silicon: it now boots to the desktop on an M1 MacBook Air, running bare metal rather than virtualized. The work leans on the m1n1 and u-boot stack to handle Apple’s idiosyncratic boot process, letting Haiku come up as a standard UEFI image loaded from USB. All eight cores are active, though USB support is shaky and the display renders in distorted colors against the native 10-bit-per-channel framebuffer.

The ARM64 port is still very early. Nightly images lack basic development tooling like gcc and git, and there is no haikuports builder yet, so the package ecosystem is thin. Contributors are improvising — sideloading files via FAT32 disk images shared with QEMU hosts, and discussing cross-building .hpkg packages from x86_64 Haiku or Linux. A proper buildbot for ARM64 haikuports is on the roadmap but unlikely before beta6.

Hardware support remains narrow and developer-driven: Pinebook Pro and similar ARM64 boards won’t work unless someone steps up to port them, though the device-tree-based boot path means it likely wouldn’t be a huge lift. For now, the demo is mostly proof that Haiku’s ARM64 work has crossed from theoretical to tangible on widely available Apple hardware.