News: 0001533367

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Haiku OS Wrapping Up Its New malloc & Various Performance Optimizations

([Operating Systems] 17 Minutes Ago Haiku OS)


The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project is out with a new monthly progress report to highlight its latest development accomplishments.

Haiku OS continues progressing steadily in 2025 for this unique open-source operating system. There have been new performance optimizations, continued hardware support work, application enhancements, and other changes to Haiku over the month of February. Some of the latest Haiku advancements include:

- More work on memory area expanding and shrinking as part of memory management improvements. The new malloc implementation for user-space is about ready and is derived in part from OpenBSD's malloc. This new malloc is able to provide some performance improvements over the old memory allocator.

- Rewriting the kernel FIFO implementation to use more atomics and less locks. A Stress-NG pipe benchmark now jumps from ~230MB/s to ~2.5GB/s.

- A number of fixes to make it possible to build Haiku on FreeBSD and Linux distributions using the musl C library.

- Support for AMD I2C buses within the I2C PCH driver (pch_i2c).

- Disabling C5 and C6 C-states on Intel Skylake systems to fix boot issues for some systems.

- Improved search performance within HaikuDepot.

- Fixing memory management problems and race conditions within Tracker.

- Haiku's virtual keyboard will now handle screen mode changes to properly refresh and adapt when the display changes.

- Documentation improvements.

More details on these February 2025 changes to Haiku via [1]Haiku-OS.org .



[1] https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/waddlesplash/2025-03-11-haiku_activity_contract_report_february_2025/



phoronix

The work [of software development] is becoming far easier (i.e. the tools
we're using work at a higher level, more removed from machine, peripheral
and operating system imperatives) than it was twenty years ago, and because
of this, knowledge of the internals of a system may become less accessible.
We may be able to dig deeper holes, but unless we know how to build taller
ladders, we had best hope that it does not rain much.
-- Paul Licker