After two years of development and a week after the project's 25th anniversary, the sixth beta release of the Haiku R1 operating system has been released. The project was initially created as a response to the demise of BeOS and developed under the name OpenBeOS, but was renamed in 2004 due to claims related to the use of the BeOS trademark in the name. Several bootable Live images (x86_64, x86 1.4 GB) have been prepared to evaluate the new release. The source code for most of Haiku is distributed under the free MIT license, with the exception of some libraries, media codecs, and components borrowed from other projects.
Haiku OS is designed for personal computers and uses a custom kernel built on a modular architecture, optimized for high responsiveness and efficient execution of multithreaded applications. An object-oriented API is available for developers. The system is directly based on BeOS 5 technologies and aims for binary compatibility with BeOS 5 applications. Minimum hardware requirements: Pentium CPU and 384 MB of RAM (Pentium 4 and 512 MB of RAM recommended, or 2 GB of RAM when building BeOS 5).
OpenBFS is used as a file system, which supports extended file attributes, journaling, 64-bit pointers, support for storing meta tags (for each file, you can store attributes in the form key=value, which makes the file system look like a database) and special indexes to speed up retrieval by them. B+ trees are used to organize the directory structure. From the BeOS code, Haiku includes the Tracker file manager and the Deskbar, which were open-sourced after BeOS left the scene.
Main innovations:
- Support has been added for current releases of Firefox and Mozilla-based projects such as LibreWolf, Waterfox, Floorp, and Icedove (Thunderbird), which can now be installed via the HaikuDepot repository.
- The NVMM (NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor) hypervisor has been ported, allowing QEMU to run virtual machines using the Intel VT-x and AMD-V hardware virtualization mechanisms.
- The HaikuPorts project provides support for ports of various programs, including many KDE and GNOME applications. A compiler and runtime port for the Go programming language has been added to the repository. NVIDIA graphics drivers for RTX 2xxx and newer graphics cards have been ported.
- Numerous performance optimizations have been implemented, which together have reduced HaikuWebKit build times by almost half (from 4:53 to 2:33). MIME type processing has been accelerated by 5-10 times. Implementations of hashing functions have been sped up. Kernel lock handling in the VFS and memory management system has been improved. Unnamed pipe performance has been improved. Directory element and inode caching has been improved, resulting in significantly faster operations when working with large numbers of files.
- Memory management has been refactored. Low-memory performance has been improved. Memory consumption by packagefs structures has been reduced by 20%. Performance of memory attributes and mprotect areas has been improved. A new implementation of malloc, based on code from OpenBSD, has been added to libc. The mmap implementation has been improved. These optimizations allow Haiku to boot in graphical mode on a 32-bit system with only 128 MB of RAM.
- In the Tracker file manager, pressing the Shift key while a menu is open now changes the behavior of some menu items (for example, instead of moving to the trash bin, a delete button is displayed).
- The file search interface now allows you to limit the search to specific directories.
- SoftwareUpdater now automatically removes old package states after a specified period of time. The pkgman utility now recommends running the "pkgman cleanup" command when a large number of old package states are detected.
- The built-in screenshot utility, which is called by the PrintScreen key, now supports selecting the area on the screen to be saved.
- The Team monitor utility, invoked by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del, provides grouping of non-GUI applications launched by a program with a graphical interface.
- The DriveSetup partition manager now has a "Disk image" menu for working with disk images (mounting images, copying the contents of disk partitions to images and vice versa).
- In the display server and the app_server window manager now supports reconnecting applications and restoring their state (after an app_server crash, all previously running applications are now automatically reconnected).
- The PowerStatus battery status indicator has been updated to support multi-battery systems.
- Support for dark mode and HiDPI has been improved in various applications.
- The launch_roster utility has the ability to display the status of all services and jobs in a tabular format.
- The FAT file system now supports 4KB sectors and disks larger than 2TB. Free block scanning has been optimized in BFS.
- Improved support for hardware released in the last 5 years. Audio output issues have been resolved. Support for USB Ethernet and Wi-Fi adapters has been expanded by porting drivers from FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
- Expanded POSIX compatibility by adding support for the getresuid, setresuid, getresgid, setresgid, pipe3, dup2, mkostemp, reallocarray, memmem, qsort_r, posix_devctl, pthread_getcpuclockid, and posix_spawn_file_actions_add[f]chdir functions, as well as the O_CLOFORK, MSG_CMSG_CLOEXEC, MSG_CMSG_CLOFORK, SOCK_SEQPACKET, MSG_TRUNC, MSG_PEEK, and WCOREDUMP flags.
- Added support for functions specific to GNU and BSD systems: getloadavg, closefrom, and closerange.
- Improved compatibility with the FUSE API used in squashfs and exFAT file system implementations.
- The development of the port for the ARM64 architecture has continued and now loads successfully in virtual machineExperiments are underway to run Haiku on systems with Apple M1 chips.
Source: opennet.ru
