Haiku Monthly Activity Report – May 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Haiku Monthly Activity Report – May 2021

haiku-os.org

96 pointsbitigchi20 comments

Nice to see contribs from a variety of people, Haiku is definitely not a one-person project. Lots of respect for their community.

> The new font is Spleen, an open source monospace bitmap font designed by Frederic Cambus.

Super cool! That's the default font in OpenBSD, created by an OpenBSD dev.

> korli implemented stack protection support in Haiku (currently disabled by default, configurable at compile time).

Security is an issue for Haiku so it's great to see progress there. I wonder if Haiku could get pledge(2) and unveil(2) like OpenBSD and SerenityOS?

I used BeOS as my main OS for something like two years back in the day, and recently I tried out Haiku. It’s quite stable and has a modern browser, emacs, and our favorite compiler. It’s also so alien that I doubt there are exploits around for it.

I also used BeOS back in the mid nineties, first on an actual BeBox-133 and later on a dual PIII-450 PC. I still have bouts of nostalgia for that setup. The GUI and UX were extraordinary.

Looks like it's still got a ways to go to be a true daily driver, especially in terms of a web browser, but it's certainly usable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOeOfBl3mbI

It's scarcely necessary to "exploit" an operating system which essentially lacks any security model. If you are code running on Haiku, you have better than superuser privileges. Such code can (while the mere user cannot) do stuff like alter the internals of "read-only" system software, blow up the operating system internals or scribble all over the raw disk.

Back in the day Haiku didn't do the hostname check in its TLS code. Browser, command line tools, package updates, everything just ignored hostnames - so it would have apparently secure HTTPS fetches, but under the hood if you can interpose and hand Haiku a certificate you got for say your personal blog from Let's Encrypt, that checks out fine even though the name doesn't match - so you could impersonate Haiku's update servers. They did, after many years, fix that particular issue, but lots of similar bugs remain, you're primarily hoping nobody tries anything.

> Such code can (while the mere user cannot) do stuff like alter the internals of "read-only" system software, blow up the operating system internals or scribble all over the raw disk.

Who cares. OS stuff is easy to replace. The real problem is that it can also destroy any user data... just like every binary on Linux or Windows.

I 100% agree with you. Who cares about protecting the OS (which can easily be restored), it’s my personal documents / pictures which are valuable. Sadly any rogue app (which runs in the “protected” systems) can destroy those “user access” documents. *nix/Win10/Mac doesnt protect against those apps.

The real problem is the OS is fundamentally compromised and your data is at risk of leaking. If you work with data covered by the GDPR that's a no go. Also, I'd not risk logging into my banks website on such an OS.

Not only that, it can also be used as a jumphost to other machines in your network.

So what you’re saying is, run Haiku on a Pentium 4?

I still need to play with Haiku (or BeOS).

Much as I like POSIXey stuff, and am perfectly happy with macOS or Linux, a part of me feels like POSIX is an example of the "curse of the good enough". It's nice to see an open source non-Unix getting a bit of love, even if it's still somewhat of a niche audience right now.

Haiku is POSIX compatible, thus giving access to a wide software library, while keeping it coherent on the UI-UX side. Native applications are slowly coming through, though.

I actually didn't know that. Maybe I should boot Haiku onto one of my secondary PCs and try playing with it.

If you run into any issues, please drop by the forums or the IRC to get assistance.

Haiku yes, BeOS not so much, if I recall correctly just a small subset was implemented.

Linux became popular within five years of its conception. What future lies ahead for Haiku and similar projects? Are they destined to remain forever little curiosities on the outside and huge time sinks on the inside? I wish I could see otherwise, but somehow I can’t...

Linux fulfilled the need of a free beer UNIX clone given the uncertainity of BSD.

Haiku cannot do the same for BeOS.

The multimedia capabilities of macOS, iOS, Windows and Android have moved far beyond what BeOS was capabale of, and Haiku does litte to improve over them.

For example Metal/DX 12 versus the existing GL drivers, or the real time audio frameworks on the OSes listed above.

I have a silly question, first I'm not an expert on operating systems internals, second I'm not trying to imply that all the hard work from these brave souls is a waste of time, third I do understand they joy as a programmer of working on your own little universe, even if the community is tiny, and don't want to discourage anyone working on this project.

but why not use like a BSD kernel and then attach the BeOS/Haiku window manager on top, implement the BeOS API ("bine") against BSD, so you can run all apps. You would get lots for free, drivers, kernel security, tried & tested, ACL (don't know how that would work against BeFS), ports, etc.

I tried BeOS 5 just before it was scrapped. Sad.

Edit: Some answers here. But if wine works, why couldn't bine work?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)#Compa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Haiku_(operating_sy...

It probably would work.

Lots of people use Linux+Wine, but ReactOS exists too as a ground-up implementation with its own Windows-like kernel. Why didn't they just make a well-integrated wine distro instead? and the ReactOS wiki answers: """design and implementation decisions of Linux and Wine architectures which prevent 100% compatibility""". The ReactOS kernel also natively supports many Windows drivers.

There is this question "Why not linux" in the Haiku FAQ: https://www.haiku-os.org/about/faq/#why-not-linux that suggests they just think it's more integrated and unified this way. They are probably correct.

It sounds like you're thinking the world would be further along if people got behind one single cause. Maybe that's true, it is certainly more work to rebuild the world. But hobbyist interest is probably non-fungible, people are just going to build whatever they feel like.

Nice to see projects like this

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