Improvements since R1/Alpha1

Haiku R1 Alpha1 was released on September 14, 2009 as hrev33109 This page outlines some of the more notable changesets since then. Additions and corrections are encouraged.

• Created a new file image type, 'anyboot', which allows a Haiku image to be burned as an ISO or written directly to USB

• Enabled font hinting in freetype,
  • hrev33789
  • The patent for Freetype's TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER expired some time before Oct. 27, 2009.
  • Note: subpixel rendering is disabled by default

• Various vendor software has been updated, most notably bash from 2.x to 4.x

• Locale kit merged to trunk, some applications and preflet already localized and translated to some languages

• Creation of a Localization team for translating the User Guide and other documents.

• Vastly improved USB mass storage performance through a better page mapping strategy

• API/ABI Changes
  • BJoystick -- fixed a BeOS compatibility issue
  • GCC 4 ABI changes that require apps to be recompiled
  • Introduced library versioning

• WiFi merged into trunk from external repo
  • Drivers and some associated firmware are included in default images
  • Non-distributable firmwares can be installed via install-wifi-firmwares.sh
  • Encryption is not properly implemented
  • A temporary & experimental application setwep can allow WEP based encryption

• SpicyKeys integrated as Shortcuts

• Huge speedups -- specifically with compilation times.

• Many lock contentions have been improved

• Numerous code refactoring to kernel/VM subsystems

• Compile times of Haiku from within Haiku have greatly been reduced

• HDA on nvidia chipset improvements

• The UDF file system module has been fixed and was added to the default images hrev35653

• ACPI is now in a usable state. In hrev36474, it was enabled by default.

• Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI) have been implemented (hrev36225). They provide a different way for supporting hardware to signal an interrupt and do not require the use of the IO-APIC. Some of the FreeBSD network drivers make use of this feature which makes them not depend on the legacy PCI interrupt configuration and therefore makes the hardware work where previously no PCI interrupt was configured or where the advertised interrupt wasn't actually the one in use.

• Haiku GCC4 can now be compiled directly on a 64bit Linux distro. GCC2 still requires the use of linux32

• DriveSetup will now install a basic bootloader when partitioning a disk. hrev33263

• hrev33417 , hrev33418 RemoteDesktop client

• hrev36127 fixed a network bug that could result in web pages being partially loaded

• PackageFS
  • initial commit hrev34172
  • basically working
  • for proper integration a UnionFS needs to be implemented, such that one can edit a file that has been inserted by a package (like config files).
  • thorough testing required
  • test packages need to be created

• installoptionalpackage
  • rudimentary script to alleviate the lack of a proper package management solution via PackageFS
  • allows installation of some of ​Haiku's OptionalPackages

• Various POSIX compliance fixes

• Bug fixes galore