Haiku, the open-source operating system inspired by BeOS, has released R1/beta6, about a week after the project’s 25th anniversary. “We’ve come a long way since the project began a quarter-century ago in 2001,” the release notes say. The beta wraps up almost two years of work and resolves more than 530 bugs and enhancement tickets, and the team calls it Haiku’s most polished and stable release so far.
It’s still beta software. The project says it is feature complete but has known and unknown bugs, and it can’t promise against data loss. The release is available for 32-bit and 64-bit x86.
Official Firefox
The headline change is the browser. Firefox-based browsers showed up in Haiku’s software depots a few months after beta5, initially buggy and unbranded. After two years of work on both Haiku and the port, Mozilla has allowed official “Firefox” branding. “So if anyone asks ‘Does Firefox run on Haiku?’, you can now say ‘Yes, it does!'” the notes say. LibreWolf, Waterfox, Floorp and Icedove, a de-branded Thunderbird, are also in HaikuDepot. These are x86_64 only for now, and problems should go to HaikuPorts rather than Mozilla.
Haiku also now supports NVMM, the NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor, which gives QEMU hardware virtualization on most x86_64 machines with Intel VT-x or AMD-V. Adding -accel nvmm to the QEMU command line enables it, with support for 32- and 64-bit guests and SMP. The project still calls it somewhat experimental. A port of the Go compiler and runtime (version 1.26.1) is also available.
Much faster on file-heavy work
Performance work runs through the whole system: a 5-10x faster MIME sniffer, finer-grained kernel locking, FIFO pipe throughput up from hundreds of MB/s to multiple GB/s, optimized library routines, and kernel malloc size classes retuned for the first time since 2007. Changes to the directory-entry and disk block caches had the biggest visible effect. In one test, git status on a repository with more than 160,000 files went from about 33 seconds to 20 seconds with a cold cache, and from about 15 seconds to 2.5 seconds with a hot one. A full HaikuWebKit rebuild dropped from 4 hours 53 minutes on beta5 to 2 hours 33 minutes.
The desktop picked up practical improvements as well. Tracker menus now update live when modifier keys change, Find can filter query results to chosen folders, and SoftwareUpdater cleans up old package states automatically instead of letting them pile up. The Screenshot tool can capture a selected area, Team Monitor groups background subprocesses under their parent app, and DriveSetup gained a Disk Image menu.
Haiku is built mostly by volunteers, without AI-generated code or materials in first-party components. Developer waddlesplash worked as a contractor for the whole cycle, funded by donations to the nonprofit Haiku, Inc.
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