After a year and a half of development, the fourth beta release of the Haiku R1 operating system has been published. Initially, the project was created as a reaction to the closure of the BeOS OS 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, x86-64) have been prepared to evaluate the performance of the new release. The source code for most of the Haiku OS 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, uses its own core, built on the basis of a modular architecture, optimized for high responsiveness to user actions and efficient execution of multi-threaded applications. For developers, an object-oriented API is presented. The system is directly based on BeOS 5 technologies and is aimed at binary compatibility with applications for this OS. Minimum hardware requirement: Pentium II CPU and 384 MB RAM (Intel Core i3 and 2 GB RAM recommended).
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:
- Improved performance on screens with high pixel density (HiDPI). Implemented correct scaling of the interface, not limited to changing the size of fonts. On first boot, Haiku now tries to automatically detect if it has a HiDPI screen and select the appropriate dimensions for scaling. The selected options can be changed in the settings, but they still require a reboot to apply. Zoom options are supported in most native apps and some ports, but not all.
- Provided the ability to use a look with a flat window decorator and flat button styling, instead of a design heavily using gradients. The flat design comes with the Haiku Extras package and is enabled in the appearance settings section.
- Added a layer to ensure compatibility with the Xlib library, allowing you to run X11 applications in Haiku without running an X server. The layer is implemented by emulating Xlib functions by translating calls to Haiku's high-level graphics API.
- A layer has been prepared to ensure compatibility with Wayland, which allows you to run toolkits and applications using this protocol, including applications based on the GTK library. The layer provides the libwayland-client.so library, based on the libwayland code and compatible at the API and ABI level, which allows you to run Wayland applications without modification. Unlike typical Wayland composite servers, the layer does not run as a separate server process, but is loaded as a plugin to client processes. Instead of sockets, the server uses a native message loop based on BLooper.
- Thanks to layers for compatibility with X11 and Wayland, we were able to prepare a working port of the GTK3 library. Of the applications that can be launched using the port, GIMP, Inkscape, Epiphany (GNOME Web), Claws-mail, AbiWord and HandBrake are noted.
- Added a working port with Wine that can be used to run Windows applications in Haiku. Of the limitations, the ability to run only in 64-bit builds of Haiku and the ability to run only 64-bit Windows applications are noted.
- Added a port of the GNU Emacs text editor that works in graphical mode. The packages are hosted in the HaikuDepot repository.
- Support for generating and displaying image thumbnails has been added to the Tracker file manager. Thumbnails are stored in extended file attributes.
- Implemented layer for compatibility with FreeBSD drivers. Ported drivers from FreeBSD to support Realtek (RTL) and Ralink (RA) wireless USB adapters. Of the restrictions, the need to connect the device before booting is noted (after booting, the device is not detected).
- Ported 802.11 wireless stack from OpenBSD with 802.11ac support and iwm and iwx drivers with support for Intel "Dual Band" and "AX" wireless adapters.
- A USB-RNDIS driver has been added that allows you to organize the operation of an access point via USB (USB tethering) for use as a virtual network card.
- Added a new NTFS driver based on a library from the NTFS-3G project. The new implementation is more stable, supports file caching layer integration, and provides good performance.
- Added translator for reading and writing images in AVIF format.
- The browser engine of HaikuWebKit is synchronized with the current version of WebKit and transferred to a network backend based on the cURL library.
- Support for 32-bit systems with EFI has been added to the bootloader, and the ability to install a 64-bit Haiku environment from a 32-bit EFI bootloader has been provided.
- Improved compatibility with POSIX standards. Continued replacement of calls to the standard C library, previously ported from glibc, to variants from musl. Added support for C11 streams and locale_t methods.
- Improved driver for NVMe drives, added support for TRIM operation to inform the drive about freed blocks.
- The ability to build the kernel and drivers with new versions of GCC (including GCC 11) is provided, to build the system due to bindings to old code, GCC 2.95 is still required for compatibility with BeOS.
- General work has been done to improve the stability of the entire system.
Source: opennet.ru