After a year of development, the third beta release of the Haiku R1 operating system has been published. The project was originally created as a reaction to the closure of the BeOS operating system 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:
- The WebPositive web browser developed by the project has been switched to use the WebKit 612.1.21 engine. Significantly improved stability and compatibility with other browsers.
- Improved installation process. The partitioning interface has been simplified and the interface for setting up drivers has been modernized.
- Expanded hardware support. Wireless drivers ported from FreeBSD 13. Added new drivers for sound cards, storage systems and USB devices. Improved USB 3 support. Improved performance on systems with NVIDIA graphics cards (GeForce 6200-GeForce Go 6400).
- Implemented the ability to resume downloading updates interrupted due to network failures.
- Improved support for dark color themes.
- The ability to disable the touchpad has been added to the input system settings.
- Improved support for XFS and NFS file systems.
- Added support for Sun VTOC partition tables.
- Provided scaling scrollbars depending on the font size.
- Improved localization support.
- Improved stability of MediaPlayer. Added support for 4K video.
- The package manager provides support for running handler scripts during package removal.
- Updated software versions. Python 2 has been deprecated and replaced by Python 3.7.
- The app_server graphics server has redesigned memory management and added additional composite rendering operations (used in the browser to render canvas elements).
- The terminal emulator supports escape sequences for displaying repeated characters.
- Improved compatibility with POSIX specifications, including support for mlock/munlock, ppoll, and exp10/exp10f/exp10l operations.
Source: opennet.ru