Haiku Archive

Hello, it has been some time since my last article, in the meantime I continued to improve things out and since I changed some important parts of the media_kit, I think it's correct to notify the community about new and 'old' features added recently. This is an article mostly written for application developers, but I tried to explain the improvements made with simple words so I hope it will be interesting to anyone.

Since the switch to our package manager, there was no longer a way to influence the boot process at all. The only file you could change was the UserBootscript which is started only after Tracker and Deskbar; the whole system is already up at this point.

The launch_daemon gives the power back to you, but also allow software you install to automatically be started on system boot as well. You can also even prevent system components from being started at all if you so wish.

Furthermore, it allows for event based application start, start on demand, a multi-threaded boot process, and even enables you to talk to servers before they actually started.

izcorp is another company is planning to use Haiku in a commercial product. Their line of studio recording systems is currently running BeOS and Zeta, but they are working on an update to Haiku. Ithamar is working with them to get their hardware fully supported, and the changes will be upstreamed to Haiku in the coming weeks. This includes several fixes to the USB stack, the intel_extreme driver, and there could be more to come.

"Discover HAIKU" is your gateway to the world of HAIKU. Delivered to you on a premium quality 8GB USB stick, you can boot to it directly, or install it to an empty hard drive volume on your computer. It comes with a new, up-to-date version of HAIKU, introductory videos, and a mile-long list of tested, proven programs and tools that will make your adventure exciting.

A few years back, the Macintosh operating system was considered innovative and fun. Now many view it as dated and badly in need of a rewrite rather than a simple upgrade. Windows 95 is the most popular operating system in the world - but this operating system is in many ways a copy of the Mac OS, less the Mac's character. Many programmers and computer enthusiasts enjoy the command-line interface power of Unix - but Unix isn't nearly intuitive enough for the average end user. What users really want is an operating system that has an easy-to-use graphical user interface, takes advantage of the power of today's fast microprocessor chips, and is unencumbered with the burdens of backward compatibility. Enter Be, Inc., and the BeOS - the Be operating system.

Since the last time, the expression parser has grown several new capabilities. We are now able to infer the types of operands, and as such one no longer needs to set the type that one wishes the value to be returned as. A further consequence is that expressions can now return arbitrarily typed values as results, not just simple numeric values. This means that, for instance, an expression can return a data member of a class, and if that member is itself an object or other more complex type, it can then be expanded to look at its internal values.

As I talked to many attendees about various things like our package management, scheduler update, WebPositive progress, Wi-Fi, ASLR/DEP, and anything else I could think of, and there was an overwhelming positive energy about Haiku by those who saw it in action. By far the most common question I got was "When will the next release be out?". In the past, I would say the most common question is "Why would I ever choose Haiku over any existing Linux distribution?", so it is nice to see that there was a lot more positive energy about Haiku, as well as excitement about the next release.

My area of interest is broadly defined kernel development. In the spring of 2013 I implemented ASLR and DEP which caused minor confusion due to "activation" of bugs that have been hidden but I think that overall it worked out well for Haiku. Later I tinkered a bit with RTM (Restricted Transactional Memory), new extension introduced in Haswells but the code will need a lot of work before it will become usable. From October to mid-January, I was employed by Haiku, Inc. to work on the scheduler and adaptating Haiku for work on systems with more than one logical processor. Among other things, I got rid of the 8 processors limit, which was quite firmly rooted in the ABI inherited from BeOS.

I'm proud to announce that, at last, the package management branch has been merged into the main development line, aka master branch. The builds and nightly images from hrev46113 on will include the new feature.

I only notice now that I should probably have given Matt a heads-up upfront, since due to the somewhat changed build process the build bot will need an update. So there might be a bit of a delay until the first Haiku PM nightly images will hit the website. Sorry for that.

Although I have been a lazy blogger lately we haven't been lazy working on our remaining tasks at all. So, unsurprisingly, since my previous post we have reached and passed a few nice milestones. The latest one is that we're finally able to build the gcc2/gcc4 hybrid Haiku images again, including all the software needed for the official release.

While that in itself isn't a particularly impressive feat - after all we were already able to build the complete gcc 2 part before - the interesting aspect is how we are doing it.