Haiku has come a long way in the last six years. The aim for the 1.0 release is full source and binary compatibility with BeOS Release 5 (the last public release). A lot of applications run already, and the team has implemented my favorite feature from BeOS: the BFS. There are only two filesystems I consider to have a truly elegant design—BFS and ZFS. While BFS lacks a few features you would expect from a new design, such as snapshots, it is still a very good choice for a desktop.
Haiku has come a long way in the last six years. The aim for the 1.0 release is full source and binary compatibility with BeOS Release 5 (the last public release). A lot of applications run already, and the team has implemented my favorite feature from BeOS: the BFS. There are only two filesystems I consider to have a truly elegant design—BFS and ZFS. While BFS lacks a few features you would expect from a new design, such as snapshots, it is still a very good choice for a desktop.
The basic design of BFS is close to UFS, with the addition of journalling and the use of B+ trees to store directory contents. BFS inodes were at least one disk block, because this is the smallest amount you can efficiently read from a disk. This left about 200 bytes free per inode. Rather than waste this space, BFS used this for “small data,” or typed key-value pairs containing arbitrary information.
While storing arbitrary metadata was nice, as was the fact that you could get at it all just by reading the inode (making folder listings with metadata very fast), BFS had one extra trick. It was possible to create folders containing indexes of metadata, which would be automatically updated.
One of the ways in which BeOS gained some speed was to put the file icon into the metadata. This meant that a single disk read would get all of the information required to display a file in the Tracker (the BeOS file manager). Haiku does this, too, but uses a highly compressed vector graphics format, giving a much higher visual quality.
Haiku is more or less ready for their 1.0 release in terms of features, although not in terms of bugs (a lot still remain). Hopefully this will improve in the next few months, making Haiku a potentially interesting operating system for future desktops.
http://www.vintagecomputermanuals.com
http://www.g2analyst.com/