We’ve got the Haiku activity report covering February, and aside from the usual slew of bug fixes and minor improvements, there’s one massive improvement that deserves attention.
waddlesplash continued his ongoing memory management improvements, fixes, and cleanups, implementing more cases of resizing (expanding/shrinking) memory areas when there’s a virtual memory reservation adjacent to them (and writing tests for these cases) in the kernel. These changes were the last remaining piece needed before the new
↫ waddlesplash on the Haiku websitemallocimplementation for userland (mostly based on OpenBSD’s malloc, but with a few additional optimizations and a Haiku-specific process-global cache added) could be merged and turned on by default. There were a number of followup fixes to the kernel and the new allocator’s “glue” and global caching logic since, but the allocator has been in use in the nightlies for a few weeks with no serious issues. It provides modest performance improvements over the old allocator in most cases, and in some cases that were pathological for the old allocator (GCC LTO appears to have been one), provides order-of-magnitude (or mode) performance improvements.
Haiku also continues replacing implementations of standard C functions with those from musl, Haiku can now be built on FreeBSD and Linux distributions that use musl, C5/C6 C-states were disabled for Intel Skylake to fix boot problems on that platform, and many, many more changes. There’s also bad news for fans of Gopher: support for the protocol was removed from WebPositive, Haiku’s native web browser.
