operating system developers to creating ports for the RISC-V and ARM architectures. Already successful for ARM necessary bootstrap packages to run the minimal boot environment. In the port to RISC-V, work is focused on ensuring compatibility at the libc level (support for the "long double" type, which has different sizes for ARM, x86, Sparc, and RISC-V). In the process of working on ports in the main codebase, GCC 8 and binutils 2.32 were updated. To develop Haiku ports for RISC-V and ARM, Docker containers have been prepared that include all the necessary dependencies.
There have also been advances in optimizing the rpmalloc memory allocation system. Changes made to rpmalloc and the use of a separate object cache have reduced memory consumption and reduced fragmentation. As a result, by the time of the second beta release, the Haiku environment will be able to install and boot on systems with 256 MB of RAM, and maybe even less. Work has also begun on auditing and restricting access to the API (some calls will be available only to root).
Recall that the Haiku project was created in 2001 as a reaction to the curtailment of the development 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. The system is directly based on BeOS 5 technologies and is aimed at binary compatibility with applications for this OS. The source code for most of the Haiku OS is distributed under a free license. , with the exception of some libraries, media codecs and components borrowed from other projects.
The system is focused on personal computers, uses its own kernel, built on the basis of a hybrid architecture, optimized for high responsiveness to user actions and efficient execution of multi-threaded applications. 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 have been open-sourced since BeOS was discontinued.
Source: opennet.ru