Haiku R1/beta6 Released With Firefox Branding and QEMU Acceleration

The Haiku project has announced the release of R1/beta6, the sixth beta of its open-source desktop operating system, which specifically targets personal computing.

Two years of work, more than 530 closed tickets

The announcement was posted on the project's site on August 26, about two years after the previous release, R1/beta5, and only about a week after Haiku's 25th birthday. According to the release notes, over 530 bug and enhancement tickets were resolved for this release. The project stresses that Haiku remains beta-quality software: feature complete but with known and unknown bugs, so no assurances against data loss can be given. The notes also state that Haiku is developed by a small team made up mostly of volunteers, without code or other materials generated by "AI" in first-party components.

Firefox with official branding, and QEMU acceleration

A few months after beta5, the first working browsers built on the Firefox codebase appeared in the software depots — initially quite buggy and without official branding. They stabilised over the past two years, and Mozilla has now given permission for the official "Firefox" branding to be used, so the question "does Firefox run on Haiku?" can now be answered with a yes. LibreWolf, Waterfox, Floorp and Icedove, a de-branded version of Thunderbird, are also available in HaikuDepot — though Firefox and its derivatives are only available for x86_64 at the moment. The same release adds hardware virtualization for QEMU on x86_64 through NVMM, the NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor, on most systems with Intel VT-x or AMD-V; it is enabled by adding "-accel nvmm" to the QEMU command line and is still described as somewhat experimental.

Performance: HaikuWebKit builds twice as fast

The release notes list system-wide optimisations: MIME sniffing is 5–10x faster or more, string hashing is quicker. Avoiding exclusive locks in the FIFO (pipe) implementation lifted throughput from hundreds of MB/s to multiple GB/s. The cumulative effect shows in a full HaikuWebKit rebuild: 4h53m on R1/beta5 against 2h33m on R1/beta6. Memory management was refactored as well, with a unified reservation system for memory and swap and bootloader buffer fixes that save as much as 100 MB or more of after-boot usage; Haiku can once again boot on 32-bit systems with just 128 MB of RAM.

What is still in the works

Not everything merged over the last two years made it into this release. The ARM64 port now boots all the way to the desktop under virtualization, and one contributor has an unmerged branch booting on Apple M1 hardware, while WebPositive still uses the single-process WebKit even though multiprocess mode is progressing. Other changes include FAT support for 2TB+ disks and 4KB sectors, NFSv4 fixes, a new "Disk image" menu in DriveSetup, app_server restart handling and broader support for USB ethernet and WiFi adapters. Upgrades from earlier installs take a few pkgman commands followed by a full-sync.