Another month, another activity report from the Haiku project. This past month, a lot of work went into the FreeBSD/OpenBSD network driver compatibility layer, opening the door to drivers using interfaces other than PCI or USB. Support for NFS4 took a bit of a hit with last month’s changes to VFS, and these have been addressed, and other aspects of NFS4 have been improved as well. On top of these two bigger items, there’s a list of smaller changes and fixes as well, but it’s been a calm month for Haiku so there’s less activity than normal.
I’m not sure what to add in a second paragraph here. I’m nearing act 3 in Silksong? Is that relevant here? I doubt it, but I still wanted to mention it. Only a few loose ends in act 2 and on Hornet goes!
I recently tried to daily drive Haiku on an old laptop. It went surprisingly well, though I couldn’t get audio working.
I’m wondering how many native apps are created in the last year?
@AndrewZ
> I’m wondering how many native apps are created in the last year?
Close to zero I would guess, if you mean software targeting the BeOS API. And that is sad. But it is not quite as devastating as it was back in the days of OS/2 or similar.
That said, what does “native” even mean on the desktop these days? How many “native” FreeBSD GUI applications are there? There are a few that say they were written for FreeBSD. Not many. They are all Linux applications running on FreeBSD. And when it comes to GUI, there is not even such a thing as a “native Linux GUI”. If you run KDE, are only the Qt apps native? Toolkit wise, there are more native apps for Haiku than there are for COSMIC or Niri (which use the Iced GUI API). The best browsers on Haiku are Firefox and Falkon (neither of which is native) even though there are web browsers using the Haiku API. Which one is more important for the success of Haiku on the desktop–Web Positive or Firefox?
What platform is Firefox even native to? What is it about Firefox that would make me choose Windows, or Linux, or FreeBSD, or Haiku as the preferred platform to run it on. There is not much difference really. Which OS I choose is likely based on other criteria than how Firefox runs.
Anyway, I get your point. If Haiku is ever able to gain traction with a wider audience, I hope it attracts more development against the Haiku APIs. But Haiku can be a successful OS without that. Haiku runs many of the applications that people will want to run. And it runs them pretty well.
Native for me means it doesn’t run on a browser or through emulation (like Wine) or in a VM.
kwanbis,
I agree there can be ambiguity about what “native” means without context, but I found your sentence unintentionally funny. You are explicitly citing WINE as an example of emulation, meanwhile the developers sought to explicitly use “WINE” as an acronym to say it’s not an emulator…
https://www.winehq.org/about
It’s a compatibility layer. Windows software running on wine runs pretty much natively, albeit using a windows API implemented on linux. This requires a new windows loader and DLLs that run on linux instead of windows, but as far as I know the software runs unmodified as a normal process.
IIRC, WINE translates Win api calls into Linux api calls, so a more correct term will be translator.
kwanbis,
On windows, applications don’t normally call syscalls directly, instead they call kernel interface DLLs. Look at the diagram here:
https://redops.at/en/blog/direct-syscalls-a-journey-from-high-to-low
This means something like WINE can simply substitute their own DLLs and then call linux syscalls normally.
I haven’t tried, but I wonder how well WINE works with applications that bypass the kernel DLLs like this…
https://docs.redteamleaders.com/offensive-security/defense-evasion/direct-syscall-execution-in-windows
Maybe someone who is more familiar with WINE internals could comment on this…?
A big part of the BeOS API was having an extra thread in the interface code to keep response time very snappy. By porting a generic Linux application you get a generic Linux application. You completely lose the BeOS magic.
I wrote applications using the API. It takes a little work to come up to speed but the API is powerful.
This is nice timing as FreeBSD is putting a huge amount of work into laptop support and drivers. It will be nice if some of the benefit of that work spills over the Haiku as well. Desktop hardware support is an Achilles Heel for both of them.