The third beta release of Haiku continues the trend of more frequent releases in order to provide our users and developers with an up to date and stable platform to work on.

Please keep in mind that this is beta-quality software, which means it is feature complete but still contains known and unknown bugs. While we are mostly confident in its stability, we cannot provide assurances against data loss.

System requirements

This release is available on the x86 32-bit platform, as well as the x86_64 platform. Note that BeOS R5 compatibility is only provided on the 32-bit images, but the 64bit version is faster and recommended if you don't need BeOS compatibility.

MINIMUM (32-bit)

Processor: Intel Pentium II; AMD Athlon Memory: 256MB Monitor: 800x600 Storage: 3GB

RECOMMENDED (64-bit)

Processor: Intel Core i3; AMD Phenom II Memory: 2GB Monitor: 1366x768 Storage: 16GB

SSE2 support is required to use the WebPositive web browser. On machines where this is not available, it is recommended to install the NetSurf browser instead.

Highlights

Installation process

• It's possible to use Installer to cleanly reset an existing system by installing over it.
• It's possible to go back to FirstBootPrompt from Installer if you change your mind and want to use live mode.

Package management

• The system update can now resume downloads in case it is interrupted.
• Support for running a script on package uninstall
• Performance improvements for package icons handling in HaikuDepot

User interface

• Various fixes to BTextControl for better handling of cursor movements, and performance improvements
• Improved support for dark colorschemes
• Various fixes for clipping and flickering problems in app_server
• New drawing modes in app_server: tiled bitmap and composite operations
• Integration of PadBlocker in Input preferences (disable touchpad when keyboard is used)
• Scaling of scrollbars according to UI/font size
• Fixed the font overlay system and added an extra font to it (Noto Sans Symbols 2)
• Several changes to make localization better
• Support of > 8 CPU cores in ProcessController load graphs

Web browser

• Accept-Language header was missing, breaking some websites
• "Search the web" context menu works again
• Easy selection of defautl search engine from a list of common ones
• Search shortcuts, for example typing "w Haiku" in the address bar will open the Wikipedia article about Haiku.

Storage and file systems

• Improvements to XFS driver
• Fixed a kernel panic in the NFS driver
• Support Sun VTOC partition tables

BeOS compatibility

• BeLive would freeze on its splash screen due to a locking problem in BTranslatorRoster.

POSIX compatibility

• Added mlock and munlock.
• Removed a limitation on the number of dead joinable threads
• Fixed pselect interaction with signals
• Fixed the return code of fsync when called on fifo pipes
• asprintf is moved to libbsd because it is not a standard POSIX function
• Added exp10, exp10f and exp10l to math.h (only in _GNU_SOURCE)
• Fixed behavior of write() in O_APPEND mode
• Implemented posix_fallocate

System performance

• Optimize create_area to avoid O(n^{2) algorithm}
• Optimize BMenuItem::RemoveItem to be O(1) instead of O(n)
• Improvements on cpufreq management
• Improve caching in MediaPlayer to allow playing 4K video

Hardware compatibility

• Support for SD/MMC readers on the PCI bus (SDHCI)
• Improved USB 3 drivers
• Improved es1370 audio drivers
• Improved hda audio drivers
• Improved NVMe driver performance
• Improved virtio driver performance
• Improved ramfs driver stability