Search Results for: haiku

“Firefox” ported to Haiku

Haiku is already awash with browsers to choose from, with Falkon (yes, the same one) being the primary choice for most Haiku users, since it offers the best overall experience. We’ve got a new addition to the team, however, as Firefox – in the form of Iceweasel, because trademark stuff and so on – has been ported to Haiku. Jules Enriquez provides some more background in a post on Mastodon: An experimental port of Firefox Iceweasel is now available on HaikuDepot! So far, most sites are working fine. YouTube video playback is fine and Discord just works, however the web browser does occasionally take itself down. Still rather usable, though! If @ActionRetro thought that Haiku was ready for daily driving with Falkon (see first screenshot), then rebranded Firefox surely has to make it even more viable by those standards! It should be noted though that just like with Falkon, some crash dialogs can be ignored (drag them to another workspace) and the web browser can still be used. ↫ Jules Enriquez It’s not actually called Firefox at the moment because of the various trademark restrictions Mozilla places on the Firefox branding, which I think is fair just to make sure not every half-assed barely-working port can slap the Firefox logo and name on itself and call it a day. As noted, this port is experimental and needs more work to bring it up to snuff and eligible for using the name Firefox, but this is still an awesome achievement and a great addition to the pool of applications that are already making Haiku quite daily-drivable for some people. Speaking of which, are there any people in our audience who use Haiku as their main operating system? There’s a lot of chatter out there about just how realistic of an option this has become, but I’m curious if any of you have made the jump and are leading the way for the rest of us. Action Retro‘s videos about Haiku have done a lot to spread the word, and I’m noticing more and more people from far outside the usual operating system circles talking about Haiku. Which is great, and hopefully leads to more people also picking up Haiku development, because I’m sure the team can always use fresh blood.

World’s first Haiku ransomware/malware

There’s many ways to judge if an operating system has made it to the big leagues, and one of the more unpleasant ones is the availability of malware. Haiku, the increasingly capable and daily-driveable successor to BeOS, is now officially a mainstream operating system, as it just had its first piece of malware. HaikuRansomware is an experimental ransomware project designed for educational and investigative purposes. Inspired by the art of poetry and the challenge of cryptography, this malware encrypts files with a custom extension and provides a ransom note with a poetic touch. This is a proof of concept aimed to push the boundaries of how creative ransomware can be designed. ↫ HaikuRansomware’s GitHub page Now this is obviously a bit of a tongue-in-cheek, experimental kind of thing, but it’s still something quite unique to happen to Haiku. I’m not entirely sure how the ransomware is supposed to spread, but my guess would be through social engineering. With Haiku being a relatively small project, and one wherein every user runs as root – baron, in BeOS parlance – I’m sure anything run through social engineering can do some serious damage without many guardrails in place. Don’t quote me on that, though, as Haiku may have more advanced guardrails and mitigations in place than classic BeOS did. This proof-of-concept has no ill intent, and is more intended as an art project to highlight what you can do with encryption and ransomware on Haiku today, and I definitely like the art-focused approach of the author.

Haiku R1/beta5 released

It’s always a lovely day when it’s a Haiku release day – and sadly, those don’t come very often. Of course, Haiku’s nightlies tend to be rather solid so an official release isn’t really a must if you want to use Haiku, but if you were holding out for something more stable: Haiku has just released its fifth beta, Haiku R1/beta5. We’ve covered most of the new features and changes as they were developed, but since it’s been so long since the previous beta, we should cover some of the highlights. One of the collection of improvements that’s impossible to put in a screenshot is the performance improvements the successor to BeOS has received since the release of R1/beta4, and there are many. There’s a ton of general performance improvements, of course, covering everything from the kernel to applications, including much better throughput in TCP, the network stack, which should lift Haiku’s network performance much closer to that of other, more mature operating systems. There’s also an overhaul of the user_mutex system, and much more. A great many performance optimizations were done to the kernel and drivers, including batching many more I/O operations, avoiding unnecessary locks on application startup, improved pre-mapping of memory mapped files, reduced lock contention in page mapping, batched modification of the global memory areas table (and a different implementation of its underlying data structure), changes to keep page lists in-order to ease allocations, temporary buffer allocation performance improvements in hot I/O paths, support for DT_GNU_HASH in the ELF loader, and more. ↫ Haiku R1/beta5 release notes Looking at the end user side of things, the Appearance dialog has been simplified without removing any features or capabilities, and Haiku now also comes with a dark mode. The little power/battery widget in Deskbar has also been overhauled to provide more accurate battery information, and it’ll load automatically if a battery is detected in the system. Tracker (the file manager) and Icon-O-Matic have seen improvements, there’s a rewritten FAT driver, a brand new UFS2 driver, and much more. There’s also a ton of new application ports from the Qt and GTK world, especially if the last time you’ve tried Haiku was one of the previous betas. Thanks to all of these ports, it’s much more realistic now to use Haiku as a daily driver. Haiku now also offers experimental support for .NET and FLTK, which provides further avenues for ports. This is just a small selection, as there is so much more contained in this new beta release. If you’ve been running the nightlies this new beta won’t mean much to you, but if you’ve been out of the running for a while, Haiku R1/beta5 is a great place to start to see what the platform has to offer.

Haiku gets tons of performance fixes, new FAT driver from FreeBSD, and a lot more

There’s a new Haiku activity report, and it’s a big one. A lot of bottlenecks and performance issues were addressed recently, and the list is too long and detailed for me to cover everything. Haiku developer Waddlesplash does a great job in this report detailing the various things he worked on to solve some of these bottlenecks and performance issues, and they cover everything from speeding up the readv and writev I/O calls, fixing an issue with the kernel’s device_manager lock, improving ELF symbol lookup by implementing the DT_GNU_HASH hash table, and much more. As part of working on these performance issues, Waddlesplash also fixed up Haiku’s CPU time profiler. Haiku has a built-in CPU time profiler (just called profile.) Unfortunately, it’s been rather broken for years, regularly outputting data that was either empty or just didn’t make any sense. In order to use it to try and track down some of the other bottlenecks, I spent a bunch of time fixing various bugs in it, as well as the debugger support code that it relies on to function, including to stack trace collection, buffer flushing, symbol lookup, scheduler callbacks, image load reporting, and more. I also implemented userspace-only profiling (ignoring kernel stack frames entirely), fixed some output buffer sizing issues, and fixed a race condition in thread resumption that also affected strace. While it isn’t perfect, it’s much better than before, and can now be used to profile applications and the kernel to see where CPU time is being spent; and notably it now checks the thread’s CPU time counters to detect if it “missed” profiling ticks, and if so how many. ↫ Haiku’s website Beyond these performance fixes, there’s a ton of other improvements and fixes, from better handling of HiDPI displays in HaikuDepot, improvements to CharacterMap, fixing subtitles in MediaPlayer, and tons more. Of course, there’s the bevy of driver fixes, including a major overhaul of the FAT driver, which was still largely based on old, original BeOS code because Be used the FAT driver as sample code. Haiku’s FAT driver is now based on FreeBSD’s FAT driver, which addressed a whole slew of issues. This isn’t even all of it – there’s so much more in this month’s activity report, so definitely head on over and give it a read.

Haiku gets tentative Firefox port

Haiku, the platform grossing in ported browsers while its native WebPositive browser languishes, has added another notch to its belt – and this time, it’s a big one. Firefox has been tentatively ported to Haiku, but it’s early days and there’s no package ready to download – you’ll have to compile it yourself if you want to get it running. It’s version 128, so it’s the latest version, too. Without the ability to easily test and run it, there’s not much more to add at this point, but it’s still a major achievement. I hope there’ll be a nice Haiku package soon.

Haiku isn’t a BeOS successor anymore

So I got accepted into GSoC again! I’m going to be working on WebKit2. But what is WebKit2, or even WebKit, for that matter? Well, WebPositive uses WebKit to render its web pages. Currently, we use the WebKitLegacy API to communicate with WebKit. It would be nice to switch to the newer version: WebKit2. However, our port of WebKit2 still needs work. At present, it has lost its ability to even render any webpage at all! So, getting WebKit2 to work will be the primary goal of my GSoC project. If there’s time left, I might be able to integrate it into WebPositive. The advantages WebKit2 has for WebPositive will be mostly invisible to end-users. The code will hopefully be more maintainable than the deprecated WebKitLegacy and we’ll get access to several newer APIs such as the ad-blocking API. Perhaps the most visible change: problems in one part of the code should be less likely to crash the whole browser. ↫ Zardshard on the Haiku website The current state of WebPositive, the only native Haiku web browser, is emblematic of why I have personally lost all interest in the successor to what is still my favourite operating system of all time. Haiku OS supports several browsers, and if you read any forum post about which browser to use, or watch any of the enthusiastic Haiku videos by the insanely awesome Action Retro, they’ll all advise you to use any of the non-native Qt or GTK browsers instead – because WebPositive just can’t compete with the ported, non-native browsers. Since everybody using Haiku is opting to use the better ported browsers, WebPositive has fallen even more by the wayside; now it has to play catch-up, and by the time WebKit2 has been properly ported and bug-tested, and has been integrated into WebPositive, which then has to be bug-tested as well, we’re going to be months, if not years, down the line. In the meantime, the ported browsers will have been regularly updated with newer, better versions. Unless the focus for the single most important application of any general purpose desktop operating system is placed solely on WebPositive, it simply won’t be able to keep up with the ported browsers. Why even work on WebPositive at all at that point? It’s not like anyone is using it, so why bother? And this highlights a problem for people like me, who prefer to have native Haiku applications instead of ports of software I can already run elsewhere. As a former BeOS user, I am not interested in a vessel for running Qt applications that I can, in all likelihood, run better on Linux. Why would I go through the trouble of assembling a machine with hardware Haiku supports, only to then run the same applications I’m already running on Fedora or OpenBSD, but worse? If you browse through Haiku Depot today, it feels like the vast majority of modern, maintained, and working software are ports of Qt (and GTK) software we already know and love from other, more mature, more stable, more usable, and more feature-rich platforms. Haiku has chosen to pour a lot of energy and manpower into becoming an operating system designed to run ported, often Qt, applications, but the downside to that is that new and maintained native Haiku applications, that play to the strengths of the platform, are few and far between. A Haiku developer once told me that real people use Haiku every day, and they need real applications, and ported applications make it possible for not only Haiku developers themselves, but also normal users, to run and use Haiku every day. This is a valid argument that I fully understand and agree with – it just means Haiku isn’t for me. And while that’s sad for me, it’s entirely fine. Haiku’s developers have chosen to focus on building a daily-drivable operating system with tons of ported applications, instead of an ideologically pure operating system you can’t really use because it only has like 4 native applications and nothing else. And that’s a valid, smart, and practical choice that I fully respect and understand, even if it means Haiku isn’t really a BeOS successor anymore.

Haiku’s Genio IDE introduces symbol outline feature

Genio, the Haiku OS integrated development environment (IDE), is receiving another exciting update in preparation for the upcoming summer release. The update focuses primarily on improving the Language Server Protocol (LSP) stack and introduces a cool new feature: Symbol Outline. Symbol Outline allows Genio to retrieve the list of symbols defined in a source file from the language server. This list can be sorted, nodes can be expanded or collapsed, and now a symbol can be renamed directly from there. Being part of the standard LSP specification, Symbol Outline should be supported by all language servers. The development team has tested it with clangd and OmniSharp. ↫ Andrea at Desktop on fire! Improvements to tools to develop truly native Haiku applications are exceptionally welcome, if only to prevent Haiku from becoming a worse way than Linux to run Qt applications.

Haiku in February: tons of small fixes and improvements

Haiku published its latest monthly activity report, and this one is a veritable grab bag of a whole bunch of small fixes, improvements, and changes – there’s really no tent pole features or major improvements this month. Going through the list, the items that jump out at me are updated ping and traceroute applications and work on improving FFmpeg, but there’s so much more in there, so be sure to read the whole thing. At the end of the report, the Haiku project states about a possible fifth beta release: A few more tickets in the milestone were fixed, including the “ICU upgrade” one, but a few were also added (some migrated from HaikuPorts that turned out to be regressions in Haiku or its buildtools, etc.). ↫ Haiku Activity and Contract Report, February 2024 So, beta 5 is not quite ready for prime time just yet, but it feels like it’s getting closer.

Interview: Haiku developer Waddlesplash

Haiku developer and community member Waddlesplash shares his insights on the project’s current state, challenges ahead, and hopes for the future. Waddlesplash discusses Haiku’s transition from a niche project to a potential daily driver OS, emphasizing the importance of maintaining momentum and addressing data corruption bugs. ↫ Andrea at Desktop On Fire! Haiku is definitely in a good place at the moment, and there’s some real momentum from outside the project. Yes, it’s even possible to daily-drive Haiku – with caveats, of course – and I hope they can keep this going.

First bits of a Haiku compatibility layer for NetBSD

Does anyone here remember Cosmoe? Cosmoe was an attempt to combine Haiku’s API with the Linux kernel and related tools, started in the early 2000s. The project eventually fizzled out, now only an obscure footnote for BeOS diehards such as myself. It seems, though, that the idea of combining the Haiku API with a mature UNIX-like operating system refuses to die, and a few days ago, on the NetBSD Users’s Discussion List, a developer by the name of Stephan picked up the baton. Some years ago I already started to work on a compatibility layer for NetBSD and resumed working on it recently. I think a compatibility layer would mostly consist of kernel components and a custom libroot.so. I have created a libroot that provides functionality missing in libc and it should behave like the original one. It makes use of libc and libpthread at the moment as well as syscalls of the kernel components. The source can be found on Github. This is clearly an experimental project, but Stephan does note he has had success running the Haiku IPC test programs, so it’s definitely more than scribbles on a napkin. The attraction of this idea is clear, too – Haiku API, but on a stable kernel with vastly superior hardware and device support. I’m not entirely sure if it’s got life in it, but even if it doesn’t – it’s amazing work, and that in an of itself makes it a success.

Haiku monthly activity report, August 2023

The latest Haiku activity report is here, covering the month of August, and it’s a massive laundry list of fixes and improvements, but I couldn’t find any major big ticket features or fixes. August also happens to bring the first two final Google Summer of Code reports – porting .NET to Haiku, and improving various parts of Icon-O-Matic, a vector drawing program designed specifically for working with Haiku’s vector icon format. Also of note is that the main Haiku CO is down at the moment, but should be back up soon.

Correction: support for Haiku not upstreamed into GCC

A necessary correction to an earlier post: support for Haiku has not been upstreamed into GCC. From the Haiku development mailing list: It is definitely our goal to get Haiku’s GCC toolchain upstream, and that commit does indeed nudge us a little in that direction… However it’s a small portion of a larger commit adding architecture support. Good to have this cleared up.

Haiku OS support upstreamed into GCC

Developers of the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system have long been carrying patches for supporting the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) on their platform while this week the code was upstreamed for GCC 14. This commit to mainline GCC git adds support for the Haiku operating system. Excellent news, and well-deserved.

Haiku’s activity report for June 2023

The biggest changes last month were a series of commits by waddlesplash, all related to the user_mutex API and the consumers of it. This API is the kernel portion of the implementation of basically anything related to mutexes or locks in userland, including pthread_mutex, pthread_cond, pthread_barrier, unnamed semaphores (via sem_open), rwlocks, and more. It bears some resemblance in concept to Linux’s futex API, but is very different in both design and implementation. This month’s activity report contains a detailed description of what these commits actually entail, but as OSNews regulars will know, I’m not at all qualified to tell you what it all means. Other changes this month that my limited brain can actually comprehend are work done to make Haiku partially buildable using gcc 13, more RISC-V and ARM improvements, and a whole lot more.

Haiku’s (kernel) condition variables API: design and implementation

A few months after my contract with Haiku, Inc. began, I rewrote the implementation of the Haiku kernel’s condition variables (as opposed to our userspace condition variables, which are from POSIX.) As this new implementation has run in Haiku for over a year and shipped in the latest release with no sign of any remaining issues, I figured it is high time for a deep-dive on the API, its implementation history, and the design of the new implementation I wrote. I expect this article will be of broader interest than just to Haiku’s community, because Haiku’s condition variables API has some notable (and powerful) features not found in those of other operating systems, and its implementation is thus likewise unique (at least, as far as I have been able to figure out.) I’m currently working on a “state of Haiku” sort of article, and I’m incredibly impressed with just how stable, fast, full-featured, and usable Haiku has become on real hardware. I’ve always kept an eye on Haiku in virtual machines, but now I’m running it on real hard hardware – where it belongs – and it’s been an absolute joy. The fact that waddlesplash managed to pull off this switch basically without any issues and with few people noticing, is further illustration the project’s in a good place.

Haiku Depot Server technology modernisation

Java technology has been moving forward much faster in recent years with more frequent updates. Java 17 Long Term Support (LTS) was introduced in September 2021 and will be followed by Java 21 LTS in September 2023. With HaikuDepotServer (HDS) still on Java 11 introduced in September 2018, it was time to upgrade to 17 and then also make the transition from Spring 5 to SpringBoot 3 which was released in November 2022. Spring is a base technology for SpringBoot with SpringBoot providing more configuration and functionality by convention. These upgrades will bring HDS up to date with the current state of the art in backend Java and allow HDS to be maintained more easily going forward. An interesting look at the steps taken during this upgrade process. There’s also a brand new Haiku activity report with tons and tons of fixes, new features, and updates.

Haiku’s package management

The way Haiku handles package management and its alternative approach to an “immutable system” is one of those ideas I find really cool. Here’s what it looks like from a desktop user’s perspective – there’s all the usual stuff like an “app store”, package updater, repositories of packages and so on. It’s all there and works well – it’s easily as smooth as any desktop Linux experience. However, it’s the implementation details behind the scenes that make it so interesting to me. Haiku takes a refreshingly new approach to package management. A deep dive into Haiku’s surprisingly robust and full-featured package management system.

Haiku R1/beta4 released

The fourth beta for Haiku R1 over a year and a half of hard work to improve Haiku’s hardware support and its overall stability, and to make lots more software ports available for use. Over 400 bugs and enhancement tickets have been resolved for this release. There’s a lot here to talk about. The improved support for HiDPI looks amazing, and definitely a must-have in today’s world of 4K displays. There’s lots of new and improved drivers, including a new compatibility layer for OpenBSD WiFi drivers, a new NTFS driver, and more. The number of ports has increased by a lot thanks to X11, Gtk+, and even Wayland compatibility – Inkscape, GIMP, GNOME Web, and more. Wine has also been ported to Haiku, using a Haiku-native windowing and input backend. And much, much more. Pretty good way to start Christmas.

Haiku monthly activity report for May

The latest Haiku activity report has been published, and this one is heavy on the driver work. The intel_extreme driver has received quite a bit of love, and Haiku now has an RNDIS USB ethernet driover, which Android uses to share its WiFi connection, so you can now use an Android phone’s hotspot to get Haiku online (only a few devices have been tested so far, though. Another big improvement is the overhauled MTU. waddlesplash overhauled MTU (“maximum transmission unit”) and also receive size handling in the network stack and the FreeBSD compatibility layer. Previously, we always stayed at the default ethernet MTU of 1500, which was fine but suboptimal (as ethernet can usually support jumbo frames up to size 9000 or so), but more problematic was that we could not handle receiving anything larger than this, as it would trigger errors in the ethernet handler related to scattered I/O operations. This required a number of changes: first to the stack itself and to the IPv4 & IPv6 handlers to check the correct MTU value, then to the ethernet module to use larger buffers if necessary when reading or writing data, and finally to the FreeBSD compatibility layer to activate the larger MTUs. These changes had a side effect of fixing “high packet loss” on some devices (or at least PulkoMandy’s very recent Intel ethernet device, anyway.) This is just a small selection – there’s tons more, such as further improvements to the ARM and RISC-V ports, the addition of the OpenBSD WiFi stack to further widen Haiku’s WiFi driver pool, and tons more.

Haiku acitivity report for March 2022

The latest Haiku activity report is here – covering the month of March – and it’s a real grab bag of tons of changes, but I’m not seeing any big ticket items. This means there should be something for everybody in here, from improved support for various Intel integrated grahpics chips, to more work on the ARM port, to glibc fixes, to… Well, you get the point.