Haiku Continues Seeing A Lot Of Driver Fixes, New Malloc & Now Built By GCC 8

The Haiku operating system that is the open-source inspiration from BeOS continues with a busy 2019 following their R1 beta towards the end of last year.

Over the course of May there has been Haiku work on a new malloc implementation based on the high-performance rpmalloc mmap-based allocator, which is yielding around 10~15% performance improvements and some times even greater gains.

There also continues to be a lot of driver fixes and improvements including to their mem driver for letting user-space processes read physical memory, fixed Bluetooth drivers, FreeBSD compatibility layer corrections, corrected error checks in their USB stack, and various other fixes. Within their kernel they have also made some improvements on SPARC support.

Rounding out their work in May was upgrading to the GCC 8.3 compiler as their build compiler.

More details on their May activities can be found via Haiku-OS.org.