Haiku R1 Beta 2 Is Hopefully Not Too Far Away

The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system that has been in development since 2001 saw its long-awaited beta release in late 2018 while it looks like a second beta release could be on approach for this open-source operating system.

Haiku OS developer François Revol presented at this weekend's FOSDEM 2020 conference on Haiku OS and the R1 Beta2 that hopefully isn't too far out at this point.

Haiku R1/beta2 should be hopefully "real soon now" and infrastructure improvements made since the first beta should make it easier to spin the builds. It's still possible at this stage booting Haiku with as little as 256MB of RAM. Some recent work has been memory optimization work, thread synchronization, and switching to Musl libc for math on new platforms. The USB 3 support has also stabilized, UEFI support has landed, NVMe solid-state drives are now supported, and other improvements.

More details on the state of Haiku in early 2020 can see this PDF slide deck from the presentation in Brussels.