Submitted by Slowly but surely, Haiku is moving towards their very first alpha release. It ‘self-hosted’ for the first time in February of this year, but it did require a few hacks to work properly. The need for hacks was removed April 1st (what’s in a date) by Bruno G. Albuquerque. Recently, some more progress has been made.First of all, bug 2059 has been squashed. This bug is an important one because it allowed the kernel to crash at any given moment, especially when there was a lot of input/output activity going on on the hard disk. The bug was fixed by Ingo Weinhold and Axel Dorfler.
A more important development is that Haiku now has build system support for mixing GCC2 with GCC4. Before these changes, you either built Haiku with GCC2 and have backwards compatibility with BeOS applications (but you used a very old GCC version), or you chose GCC4 which gave you an up-to-date compiler, but no backwards compatibility. The trick is that the runtime loader now supports checking for the proper version of the libraries needed; the runtime loader does this automatically on a system-wide level. As Stephen Assmus writes, “All this combined means Haiku can use GCC4 itself while maintaining our stated goal of binary compatibility to the large pool of GCC2 applications in an automated and transparent fashion.”
Currently in the works are a fully native port of Subversion, and Dorfler is working on fixing the device manager.
Can’t wait for an actual release to try. I’ve been following Haiku for a while now. It’s great to watch the progress.
Keep up the good work, guys.
The real story is that in less than a week the Haiku Code Drive fund has broken the $5000 barrier! That means at least two students will be sponsored in addition to those sponsored by Google as part of the Summer of Code.
If you haven’t stumped up yet, go hit that “Donate” button. Voting to select the projects begins later today.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then you win!
Haiku has very great and loyal heads behind itself. It’s great to see every update since I catched up on OpenBeOS
I wonder what ex Be Inc. employees e.g. at Trolltech will say once it is out
I’ve been using various Linuxes (Linuces? Linux?) for the past 8 years, but what I actually value is freedom of choice. I’m sure I’ve got a spare computer around here somewhere. (rummage, rummage) Ah, here it is!
🙂
Ready when you are!
Congratulations on great progress!
For an ex-BeOS user who watched with anticipation (on the greenboards) as different groups struggled to gain mindshare these are truly exciting times. I look forward to usable beta’s to fiddle around with!
This is great news. Good to see a mixed gcc2/gcc4 release is possible now. Moving forwards, yet maintaining backwards compatibility. great!
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.p…
Excellent! I can’t wait for when I can replace my old BeOS 5 installation with Haiku, and start using it in a production environment.
We can even help speeding up the process if we donate a little every month at: http://www.haiku-os.org/community/donating_to_haiku
Since just about every PC sold out there is dual/quad core, they should fix the horrible SMP problems before even thinking about alpha releases… It’s a promising OS, but I’ve found it to be very unstable.
Haven’t your bug reports been getting reviewed? Clearly the KDL outputs and serial logs must have provided enough information for one of the core developers to start tracking down these issues for you.
FWIW, not many people are complaining about SMP stability issues at this point – so I’m guessing your scenario is not common.
Coverity should be used to find these bugs.
Which “horrible SMp problems”? Can you be more specific? I run Haiku on an Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme and I did not really see anything like that.
I regularly run the latest Haiku revision on an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with SMP enabled, and I never have any problems. Now 3+ months ago it would be a different story; maybe you’re just using an older revision?