Haiku R1/Beta6 Released
haiku-os.org39 points by birdculture 13 hours ago
39 points by birdculture 13 hours ago
It's been a while since I last seriously used Haiku but wow, this is an impressive beta with a ton of new milestones:
> Haiku now supports “NVMM”, the NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor
> There is now a port of the Go programming language compiler
> Firefox
> performance optimizations
From the pics it looks like KeePassXC and GIMP run on Haiku? Sweet!
> After evaluating various alternatives, we eventually devised an allocator based in large part on OpenBSD’s
Interesting, I wonder how it compares to otto malloc wrt canaries, UAF and so on. One of the criticisms of Haiku from years ago is that insufficient attention is paid to security, but I know a lot of improvements have been made.
> From the pics it looks like KeePassXC and GIMP run on Haiku? Sweet!
Yep, and for a number of years now, too.
> I wonder how it compares to otto malloc wrt canaries, UAF and so on.
A few of the more performance-affecting features have been disabled, and the global caching layer probably affects at least some of the mitigations too. But many of the checks are still intact, and indeed it's caught a bunch of memory violations in both first- and third-party applications already (though not that many in first-party code, as we did and still do use the guarded_heap system periodically, which is also very good at finding such problems.)
> that insufficient attention is paid to security
Security is not one of our biggest priorities at the moment, no, but it's not totally de-prioritized either. When we notice security issues or get reports of them, we do fix them.
> but I know a lot of improvements have been made.
Yes, there's definitely been a lot of progress in this area over the last 10-15 years. We have a number of the basic mitigations (ASLR, DEP, SMAP, etc.) but there's a lot of parts of the kernel and drivers that haven't been audited to make sure they do all necessary permissions and access checks (though these have been shrinking; I do set aside some time now and again to work on this.)
Thanks for the response, that's all great to hear. :-)
I overlooked reading the guarded_heap section on the announcement page, that's excellent work.
This is super exciting! This is one of my favorite niche OSes to watch grow.