
Haiku R1/beta1 has been released - hakfoo
https://www.haiku-os.org/news/2018_09_28_haiku_r1_beta1/
======
artsyca
Posting this from HaikuOS! Greetings earthlings! Man I feel like I've opened a
time capsule.

~~~
fit2rule
Tell us more about it -- what have you discovered? What do you like so far?
Can you use it productively for things?

~~~
artsyxxx
I'm still discovering what's going on with this OS. Apparently we can install
VMWare tools. It's been over 15 years since I've touched anything to do with
BeOS but in the words of Celine Dione.. It's all coming back to me now

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mntmn
Incredible progress, very cool! I used BeOS back in ‘99 and loved it.
Applications were straightforward to build with C++ and the BMessage system.
It had a great little community, even in Germany (“BeGeistert”!). Does Haiku
run on ARM nowadays?

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deaddodo
Yes:

[https://download.haiku-os.org/nightly-images/arm/](https://download.haiku-
os.org/nightly-images/arm/)

It's even buggier than the x86 version though, and you don't have any software
beyond what you compile for it yourself.

~~~
tossaway44
I thought the ARM version didn’t have a GUI yet...

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deaddodo
The Application Server is in progress, but it builds. The problem is that on
x86, you can fall back on the BIOS w/ VESA to display video; while ARM lacks
that functionality. If you can find/build a video driver it should Just
Work(tm).

You can see the current video drivers here:

[https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/build/jam/images/...](https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/build/jam/images/definitions/regular#L205)

Which are all x86/amd64-based. The RPi would actually be relatively simple to
throw a framebuffer video driver together for, though:

* [https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/s...](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/screen01.html)

* [https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/wiki](https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/wiki)

* [https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi/tree/master/video01](https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi/tree/master/video01)

~~~
waddlesplash
Err ... no? The problem with the ARM port is the lack of device drivers, and
the fact that there is no userland/syscalls ABI set up yet at all. So there's
still a lot to be done here.

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smallstepforman
And the release notes:

[https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/release-notes/](https://www.haiku-
os.org/get-haiku/release-notes/)

~~~
AHTERIX5000
Loving how they list Pentium II as a minimum requirement. I still have an old
netbook with Intel Atom that I use when travelling to certain parts of the
world and while it is clocked at 1.6 GHz and has 2 GB of RAM many of the
modern Linux desktops are extremely sluggish.

~~~
morganvachon
Haiku would definitely bring it to life. I had a similar Atom based netbook
and it was a perfect Haiku machine. I also have a PIII based laptop from 2000
with 512MB RAM that runs Haiku (and BeOS 5.0 Pro) extremely well.

~~~
UncleSlacky
Good news. I'm just about to try it on my Asus eeePC 701 4G, I've upgraded the
RAM to 1Gb and have an 8Gb SD card for additional storage. Fingers crossed!

~~~
david-given
I have an eee 701 --- there are graphic driver problems but it works find in
safe mode. (I think there's something weird about the eee's smaller-than-
normal screen.)

Incidentally, I recall the early eees (like mine) having a faulty SD card slot
and were unreliable writing to SD cards. Real MMC cards work fine. But that
was years ago, so maybe there's a workaround now.

~~~
UncleSlacky
Thanks for the graphic driver tip. I've never had an issue with SD cards, but
the 4G is (I think) the last iteration of the original 700 series, so
presumably it was fixed by then.

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swerner
This is a very faithful reimplementation if BeOS, which means it shares one
unfortunate limitation with it: The lack of drivers.

Already back in '99, not leveraging 3D hardware was a problem for adoption.
These days even more so, as not only 3D software but also 2D, audio and
scientific software leverage GPUs.

~~~
bebop
There has been discussion [0] on porting FreeBSD's linuxkpi framework to get
Linux drivers working on Haiku. So far I do not think anyone is actively
working on it, but it would be a very similar solution as was used to get
FreeBSD's networking drivers working on Haiku.

[0] - [https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/plans-
for-3d-acceleration/727...](https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/plans-
for-3d-acceleration/7272/8)

~~~
swerner
That would be wonderful. If I could get OpenGL support for current generation
NVIDIA or AMD hardware, ideally with OpenCL or Vulkan too (CUDA is probably
too much to ask for), I would even be able to use Haiku for my daily work.

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lcnmrn
C’mon Mozilla, make a smart move and bring Firefox to Haiku OS. Just kill that
Chrome OS thing.

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tcbawo
From what I've read in the release notes, Haiku uses GCC version 2 for ABI
compatibility reasons. Can anyone elaborate on whether this is the case, or
whether modern GCC can be/has been modified for the OS to maintain binary
compatibility. Also, what is lost in this case?

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morganvachon
There are two versions of Haiku, the hybrid 32-bit version uses the older GCC
for compatibility with software written for BeOS, plus GCC 7.3.0 for modern
app support. The other is a 64-bit release with only the modern GCC and no
backwards compatibility with BeOS apps.

[https://download.haiku-os.org/](https://download.haiku-os.org/)

~~~
tcbawo
What aspect of newer versions of GCC breaks the ABI? Are these things that
can't be controlled?

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bebop
First, to add to the parent comment, you can install later versions of GCC on
the x86 gcc2 builds as well. There is also a port of LLVM.

Second, not directly related to what changed with the ABI, but it I think it
would be more hassle than it is worth to try and make newer versions of GCC
emit compatible binaries. There is work to run Haiku GCC 2.95 libraries
alongside binaries built with a newer version. The runtime loader would be
responsible for picking the correct so files. This also would work on the x64
builds as well, similar to how Linux (and others) can load x86 programs on x64
OS's. This feature is close to working but there were some last minute issues
found, so it was left out of the Beta.

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stuaxo
Ah, so BeOS programs could work under 64 bit haiku?

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bebop
Yes, that is the plan if I understand correctly.

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grafelic
My Thinkpad 240 is ready, now waiting for an USB to IDE adapter to install
Haiku on its disk.

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netrap
I tried on mine but it wouldn't boot last time.

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cgb223
What are the advantages to using HaikuOS vs other OSes?

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smallstepforman
Same dev team does whole stack, from kernel, kits, drivers, servers to user
space. In theory, it is all integrated and has direct path from server to
kernel, resulting in more efficient system.

BeOS core API was designed for multi core systems from day one, so the design
is more modern than older systems.

The core API is C++, from kernel to user space.

Lots of things to like, it just needs more polish and devs to flourish.

~~~
tialaramex
> Same dev team does whole stack, from kernel, kits, drivers, servers to user
> space. In theory, it is all integrated and has direct path from server to
> kernel, resulting in more efficient system.

Except, while that's often what the blurb says, the implementation is
typically paste in whatever somebody else wrote and call it a day.

For example years back Haiku announced it was going to have WiFi. Its own WiFi
stack, far more integrated and reliable than things you were using on other
systems. Very exciting.

And then as a "stop gap" it pasted in FreeBSD's PCI 802.11 driver subsystem,
and the WPA Supplicant you've seen on all your Free Unix systems. And that's
where they stopped. Last time I checked they had a version of WPA Supplicant
vulnerable to KRACK but I'm sure they'd updated for the Beta.

How does their "integrated" solution handle your WiFi credentials? They use
the powerful Haiku "KeyStore" password protection system. Here's how that
works: You write the plaintext password into a file. Don't worry though, in
KeyStore they wrote "TODO: Actually encrypt". Which I think you'll agree is
almost as good as using encryption ?

> BeOS core API was designed for multi core systems from day one, so the
> design is more modern than older systems.

More modern is relative. "Older systems" in this context is stuff from the
1980s, because BeOS is roughly the same age as Linux, started in 1991.

However in Haiku you won't find anything like IO Completion ports, or futexes.
You won't find any privilege separation because everything runs as "root".
Everybody else moved on and Haiku is stuck being really quite good by 1990s
standards.

~~~
eloisant
Well, BeOS is the same age as Linux but Linux was an implementation of older
concepts (Unix) while BeOS was designed from scratch.

~~~
coldtea
That was 1991 Linux. Modern linux has moved much further than the original
implementation, introducing all kinds of non-old-time-UNIX concepts (starting
from Plan9 ones).

~~~
pjmlp
It still needs to catch up with mainframes' security, though.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
In _general_ I don't know enough to disagree, but keep in mind the context
here is comparing to Haiku, which is _not_ great at security, particularly of
the multi-user sort to which you refer.

~~~
pjmlp
There is a Multics security research paper that describes out-of-bounds as
practically non-existent thanks to PL/I features.

According to the Linux Kernel Security Summit 2018, 68% of kernel exploits are
caused by out-of-bounds errors.

That is just one example, there is plenty of material available to anyone that
wants to dive into the subject.

So just because GNU/Linux faires better in security towards Haiku, doesn't
mean there is nothing left to improve.

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sitkack
I just had an idea to use KVM and PCIe passthrough to piggy back windows
driver support for Vulkan into a PCIe device running in Haiku so Haiku could
use the latest graphics cards w/o having to write their own video drivers.
Bonus points for implementing mmap across to guest OSes. There should be a
generic hardware description for a Vulkan based paravirt PCIe graphics card.
Then the backend of the pvirt GPU could either pass it through to the driver,
send it over the network or re-translate it on the fly to AVX, WebGL, etc.

Because the first question that popped into my head was, "How do they enable
modern GPU support?"

~~~
waddlesplash
We already have a roadmap for that, see here: [https://discuss.haiku-
os.org/t/plans-for-3d-acceleration/727...](https://discuss.haiku-
os.org/t/plans-for-3d-acceleration/7272/8)

We don't want to be confined to VMs forever; in fact we already have a
sizeable number of users running on bare metal.

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artsyxxx
Can this run on VMWare?

~~~
kome
I am running it on VMWare and it works like a charm. I am writing from
WebPositive, the integrated browser, and it's prety awesome.

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gigatexal
I still think Apple should have bought NEXT and BeOS. Can’t wait to try this
out though. Loving the idea of virtio drivers

~~~
chungy
They tried buying BeOS, but the BeOS people absolutely refused to sell out to
a company like Apple. NeXT was their second choice, and they succeeded in
buying it (NeXTSTEP became Mac OS X).

~~~
chiph
IIRC, Jean-Louis Gassée named a price that Apple was unwilling to pay. I don't
know his motivation for doing that - was it all about the money? Or was it to
stick it to Apple and name a stratospheric price as a way of sending a
message?

~~~
tialaramex
Jean-Louis Gassée is an ex-Apple executive. He's why Jobs left Apple. For him
the point of Be Inc. was to show Apple they'd been wrong to subsequently get
rid of him in 1990.

When Apple were looking at BeOS / NeXT what they were really trying to decide
was whether to have Jobs or Gassée back. They picked Jobs.

After Be, Inc. sank JLG arranged to run Palm's software spin-off. This
produced the version of PalmOS that's remarkable because instead of being used
more palmtop devices than previous PalmOS versions it was used in none at all,
even the Palm hardware company never used it.

IMO Gassée would be nobody you've heard of if not for the fact of his being in
a position to force Jobs out of Apple. Everything else follows from that.

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jernfrost
Loved a BeOS when it came out but is not the whole concept outdated now? C++
all over the place seems like a bad idea for enabling the usage of other
languages as C++ is terrible at interoping with anything. Multi threading all
over the place BeOS style does not seem like way concurrency is done today
with higher order APIs.

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erikpukinskis
Sure it’s probably outdated but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist. A
Porsche 911 is outdated but it has its place in our lives.

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dmitripopov
17 years in development. Just WOW!

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Fnoord
Any way to get 802.1x working?

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waddlesplash
Yes, it's supported out of the box using FreeBSD's WiFi drivers, so it should
support most chipsets FreeBSD does.

~~~
Fnoord
Does PEAP work as well?

