Haiku OS Pulls In WiFi Driver Updates From OpenBSD, Other Improvements In February
The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project had an eventful February with a number of driver improvements and a variety of other enhancements.
Last night the Haiku project published their February 2026 status report. Some of the interesting improvements made to this open-source OS in the past few weeks include:
- Synchronizing most of the OpenBSD WiFi drivers from the upstream code, which yields a number of bug fixes.
- The VirtIO block driver has been disabled since it's been broken in at least multi-threaded use for years.
- Adding missing parameters to the NVMe driver's feature management API.
- Fixing a crash in the NTFS driver and another separate crash in the FAT driver.
- Support for reading Zstd-compressed files in the Btrfs file-system driver.
- A rework to the pthread_barrier code means less system calls and fixes some race conditions and a hang that would happen in some OpenGL software.
- An improvement to how TLB invalidations are handled on x86 to skip unnecessary invalidations and in turn slightly better performance.
Lastly, Haiku developers continue inching toward the Haiku R1 Beta 6 release. They still are working through some regressions before they start working on that next long-anticipated beta release.
More details on these Haiku OS improvements via their February 2026 status report.
Last night the Haiku project published their February 2026 status report. Some of the interesting improvements made to this open-source OS in the past few weeks include:
- Synchronizing most of the OpenBSD WiFi drivers from the upstream code, which yields a number of bug fixes.
- The VirtIO block driver has been disabled since it's been broken in at least multi-threaded use for years.
- Adding missing parameters to the NVMe driver's feature management API.
- Fixing a crash in the NTFS driver and another separate crash in the FAT driver.
- Support for reading Zstd-compressed files in the Btrfs file-system driver.
- A rework to the pthread_barrier code means less system calls and fixes some race conditions and a hang that would happen in some OpenGL software.
- An improvement to how TLB invalidations are handled on x86 to skip unnecessary invalidations and in turn slightly better performance.
Lastly, Haiku developers continue inching toward the Haiku R1 Beta 6 release. They still are working through some regressions before they start working on that next long-anticipated beta release.
More details on these Haiku OS improvements via their February 2026 status report.