The Haiku OS Just Got a Huge Update

If you’ve researched alternative operating systems that are not Linux-based, you’ve probably come across Haiku OS. If you’re using it, or if you’re considering it, you’ll be glad to know that it has gotten a lot better over the past month.

The Haiku OS team just released its latest changelog of all the changes it has rolled out over the past month, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here. A lot of these are bug fixes, but we do have a lot of them, and we’re also getting support for some other stuff that wasn’t supported before. Among the additions, Pad Wheel support on Wacom tablets has been added, making it just a tad better for creators.

Among the fixes in here, the Terminal app was reworked to prevent a common issue where it would prevent filesystems from being unmounted. Also, the “Status bar” label in Appearance preferences has been renamed to the more universally recognized “Progress bar.” The Tracker file manager received a significant overhaul, fixing a number of long-standing bugs, some dating back to the BeOS era. Mounted volumes now correctly appear on the Desktop within file panels again.

Other fixes include correcting type-ahead filtering cancellation, improving drag-and-drop functionality for more directories, and resolving issues with icon redrawing for the Trash. Additionally, apps like ShowImage and FileTypes now feature more distinct app menus, making it easier to identify each with a quick look. You’ll also be glad to know that significant progress was made in strengthening Haiku’s file systems and hardware drivers. The NFSv4 driver saw major improvements, with added checks and cache invalidation logic to prevent crashes and ensure data consistency. A new POSIX-compliant function, fdatasync, has been implemented, enhancing compatibility with software expecting this feature.

Permissions checking within the file system layer was refactored, resolving issues with synchronization tools like rsync. The EXT4 file system driver also received critical fixes, enabling directories to grow much larger without running into errors. On the driver front, new checks were added to prevent user applications from causing kernel panics with invalid data.

The kernel and its core libraries were probably updated the most often. A series of fixes were deployed for memory management, particularly improving behavior on 32-bit systems under heavy load and reducing address space fragmentation. These changes are quite necessary for the stability of memory-intensive apps like web browsers and compilers. Further stability work included fixing memory accounting for certain permissions, which resulted in more accurate reporting of used memory. The kernel’s guarded heap implementation was revived and fixed, which in turn helped uncover and resolve a hidden bug in the file system query parser.

If you want to check out the full changelog, it’s up on Haiku’s website. All these changes are now live, though Haiku is technically still beta-grade software, so do keep that in mind.

Source: Haiku OS