Haiku booting in UEFI mode
haiku-os.org
haiku-os.org
As a comparison the had builds with other operating systems and they could not compete, they ran very choppy, like 3 fps.
I suggest you try it out. It's refreshing to tinker with an OS that is so fundamentally different. When I went home I installed it on a few machines I had, which were collecting dust. Tinkering with haiku sort of reinvigorated my original wonder of computing from when I as a kid, for a couple months.
Later at the conference, I was helping at the Python booth, and I asked if haiku supported Python. The haiku guy was not sure but he got it to compile and run about 4 minutes later, and it worked!
* Connected to my site via TLSv1.2/ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
* Played a Youtube video just fine
* Was able to git and build libsodium, via the installed gcc 2.95.3
* wget'd an h.264 mp4 file and watched it via MediaPlayer
* OpenSSH 7.1 (newer Haiku ISOs may include a more recent release)
And the security model can't be helped if we want to maintain binary compatibility with BeOS - once we (mostly) drop that, we'll switch to something more sane in that department.
Sorry if these are repetitive questions btw. I'm just curious.
The kernel already has moved pretty far forward. BeOS audio drivers, for instance, don't really work anymore in favor of our new multi-audio API (I don't think anyone had any use for BeOS audio drivers; we merged all the open-source ones, I think), the VFS layer has gotten major upgrades, we rewrote the thread scheduler and removed the 8-core limit we inherited from BeOS, and already have added ASLR and DEP support, among lots of other improvements. I think the only thing at this point which actually is still compatible kernel-wise are FS drivers (sorta) and graphics drivers (although of these, we have more in-tree than BeOS ever did, so I don't know if anyone even uses old BeOS ones anymore).
Awesome, that worked. Thanks!
It's also great to hear that Haiku will eventually improve the security model. That is its biggest weakness IMO, and removing it will open a lot of new doors.
"Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful."
The FAQ doesn't even say whats good about it, just that it targets personal computing, which windows and OSX would also say. Ubuntu too, probably.
system for computing things
but details are slim
It was IMHO a "revolution" that - for whatever reasons - never happened.
Don't ask me the actual "technical" details, but it was small, very, very fast, even on the limited hardware of the time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
I have no idea if Haiku is (will be) as faster as it was BeOS at the time (when compared on the same hardware to Windows 9x or NT 4.00) when compared to a "current" Windows or Linux or MacOS, but at the time it blew away any other OS, particularly when it came to browsing the web or for music, video, etc.
Full disclosure: I used to work on this functionality at Microsoft.
Anyhow, sandboxing is just as necessary on a single-user OS as on a multi-user OS. And it's much more complex than multi-user support.
I don't see what that has to do with multi-user systems though. If your argument is that we could have the Secure Boot system ask for the passphrase and tie the entire box to a single user... then you're missing out on most of the current point of multi-user systems.
The first is that many companies actually do have multiple people using the same machines. Not at the same time, but at different times. This needs auditing - i.e. a multi-user system.
The second is, again, auditing - when a system administrator runs a command on a system remotely, they do it as their own user.
The third is security (combined with auditing) - various service processes get run in different user contexts so that they can't mess with the user's stuff unless they're allowed to, and they have their own user ID that anything they do happens under.
Operating systems aren't built for home users, they're built for companies, in almost all cases, and stripping out the multi-user framework would change the OS to be unrecognisable. Just stripping out the authentication part doesn't buy you much complexity reduction either.
In any case, I believe Android uses the multi-user features of Linux as a security mechanism (and building a new kernel from scratch might not have led to Android being a major player - ARM companies already knew how to write device drivers for Linux), although it could reasonably use an object-capability system under a more focused kernel.
(First though: Windows now supports full disk encryption and secure boot. It certainly did not when I and it parted ways back in the days of XP SP1 circa 2002.)
I was not implying that the secure pass phrase/secure boot/etc be considered the basis for a secure mobile OS. Much the contrary. Multi-user systems with privilege hierarchies are fundamental aspects of how we now architect even our single-user devices. (Discussing whether another system is possible, desirable, and/or whether we could have or will eventually go down that route is midway between hypothetical and counter-factual.)
Never mind that the first threat scenario contemplated is a physical attacker is way out there on the probability scale unless you already suspect you are on someone's hit list.
I loved them both, but I often wish Be had gone for a lot cheaper box. It would have been good on some really cheap CPUs.
When I first started University a few years earlier, I had a quard-boot Win98/2000/BeOS/Slackware box using the BeOS bootloader (it was the most colourful at the time).
/nostolgia
I remember running 12 instances of a movie on beos. This was very slow, but on Windows the same trick caused my system to hang with around 6 movies.
Beos just kept going so it felt faster.
As best i can tell, the history of computers has shown again and again that the market will tolerate at best 2 major commercial platforms.
Anyone trying to introduce a third will face a steep entry requirement.
Damn it, Jobs could not get Next off the ground when it was basically BSD with a pretty face. He needed the brand name recognition of Apple to effectively bring a revamped Next to the world (OSX).
And here came another contender that was neither one of the established platforms (Apple and Microsoft), nor was it a _nix derivative (Next ran on a BSD kernel). And it tried to pitch a vertically integrated stack in the form of BeOS running on Bebox.
Alow me to partially disagree, you are jumping over an important passage, System 6/7/8 on the Mac were there in those years. In - say - 1993 System 7 ran circles around DOS and Windows 3.1/3.11, even if a part of that was due to comparatively more powerful (and very costly) hardware, it was definitely ahead:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7
If you bought a computer and OS in pre-Windows NT era, you could choose between DOS+Windows 3.1 and System 7, but the Mac hardware costed something like double the PC.
A LC500 was something around US$ 2000:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC_500_series
A Powerbook 160 double that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_160
At the time a comparable PC or laptop was half of that.
BeOS came out when Windows 95 was all the rage and MacOS started to become outdated, circa 1995/1996, it ran on "normal" hardware and offered much better performance than Windows, but home users were happy with Windows 95 and businesses had NT 4.00 in the meantime, that - love it or hate it - was rock solid.
But if you want to compare it to 1998-style PC, BeOS was a really high-performance, POSIX-compatible OS. It could do things that neither Windows NT, Linux or MacOS (pre- OSX) could do, and it could do it even on very limited hardware.
Nowadays, I think that if Haiku could be ported to ARM, it would become a very interesting alternative for any kind of SOC-based appliance where you'd need more than a microcontroller but something like Linux/Android is overkill: smart TVs, audio/video receivers, smart home hubs, some cool guitar sound effect pedal, etc...
..or you could only chose to support devices that support device tree configuration, but there's a good chance your kernel still won't boot on half of them. ARM isn't an architecture. It's just a chip, with people implementing stuff in crazy ways all over the place that will never make it back upstream to the mainline kernel. It's a fragmented mess and there's no incentive to fix it since most ARM devices are build around planned obsolescence to be replaced every two years.
Personal pleasure of an alternative desktop. Experimental playground for OS developers. Minimalist box for older hardware with high performance. Obscurity benefit against hackers that I hear PPC Mac users still get.
A few things like that. It's not competitive against Linux/BSD desktops in about any other case.
That's what I like. For when even a good Linux distro is too much for the hardware. The slow, old thing can be transformed into a nice, new thing.
It was fascinating and awesome at the time, however, and for many of us this project brings back those erstwhile thrills. It's a kind of futuristic retrocomputing thing that (I guess) leads others to still wax lyrical about other obsolete platforms such as (say) Amiga.
http://www.vrexperience.net/Newsroom.aspx?id=120
Amiga 3000 based, and they were like supercomputers ... ... and we liked it!
The shine came off BeOS around around 1999/2000 when Windows 2000 and Mac OS X came out along with Linux and FreeBSD were much better OS'es for getting real work done with better networking and better heavy load tolerance. And you could do BeOS tricks on top of that on those OS'es.
On top of that the Amiga OS was doing what BeOS was famous for years before just without memory protection slower hardware.
"It has partial POSIX compatibility and access to a command-line interface through Bash, although internally it is not a Unix-derived operating system."
From that and just browsing around, it seems to be a vaguely Unix-ish environment; or at least it has more in common with Unices than the CPM/DOS/Windows or other OS families.
HAIKU is basically a clean-room reimplementation of the public (and private) framework modules' APIs and as such doesn't even (really) descend from BeOS-proper at all.
(Avid late-1990s BeOS user, dual PowerPC 603e-133 BeBox owner, HAIKU supporter.)
That's kind of amazing given how rare those were/are. I definitely can't top that, but I had a dual Pentium III machine that ran R5 (and ZETA for a while, which I had problems with) in the early 2000's. That thing seemed faster than the machines I have today. Good times.
I also had a dual PIII-450 machine (alias “Mad Cow”) that dual-booted Windows NT/2K and BeOS R5 (but sadly only displayed B&W 800x600 due to lack of display-adapter driver support) and consequentially was nigh unusable.
Did you ever use that machine for BeShare back in the day? Because that name associated with BeOS really stands out in my memory. Or maybe, were you on Usenet back then?
Sorry for the pointed questions, just trying to sort out where I remember you from. I discovered BeOS a few months before they folded, and managed to buy 5.0 Pro while it was still being sold by GoBe. I still have my disc and book to this day along with the BeOS Bible and Be Advanced Topics, and I recently acquired an old Dell P-III system which runs it flawlessly (I just need to round up a PATA hard drive as its original drive died a noisy death a few hours after I powered it up).
Not all OSes have these same foundational pillars. What I meant to express is that Linux does whereas others (as disjoint as Genera, Windows NT, BeOS Amiga) don't.
Plan 9 was pretty much about taking the "everything is a file" thinking to its logical end point. Meaning that you could even manipulate individual GUI windows via the FS.
I was simply musing that Linux may have taken the concept further than the BSDs while still being "unix". I can't say i ever got the impression that Plan 9 was intended to be posix compatible for instance.
Sigh, so sad.
(Although some of those are inaccurate these days - we've had OpenJDK for a few years now, for instance.)
Refuse to make the effort
To write in haiku.