4 ms·

A while ago (2011ish maybe?) I had a hand-me-down laptop whose processor speed was measured in MHz (it even had a floppy drive!). The previous owners had window

by iamevn 5y ago

A while ago (2011ish maybe?) I had a hand-me-down laptop whose processor speed was measured in MHz (it even had a floppy drive!). The previous owners had windows XP on it but that didn't really run well. I tried various Linux distros/desktop environments/window managers and found that even running a barebones AwesomeWM setup was sluggish. I decided to give Haiku a shot and was surprised by how smooth it felt. I'm pretty sure the only sluggishness I had when opening applications or booting up was because the hard drive was very slow. I don't know how they did it but somehow it worked wonderfully on this really weak laptop. (Unfortunately I couldn't get the floppy drive working, idr why but some driver issue blocked me.) Since then I've kept an eye on it and plan on going back to it with some more powerful and better supported hardware to really get to play around with stuff like the interesting filesystem and get some things I use all the time ported over. Would love to switch over from mainly using Linux to having a Linux home server, and using Haiku as a daily driver and sshing in for Linuxy stuff.

waddlesplash 5y ago
One of the other Haiku developers had this [1] response to an inquiry about why Haiku is so fast: > The system is not all that well optimized, uses a 15 year old compiler which does not uses any modern CPU features, and by default, the kernel is built in debug mode which makes it much slower than it could be. > How do other operating systems still manage to feel slower? I have no idea. (Those kernel debug options are no joke, they are a massive slowdown. The ones for the TCP stack alone take network throughput down to 1/5 of what it is without it; the ones for SMP, the virtual memory manager, lock facilities, etc. combined make the system visibly less snappy. We disable these on beta builds, but they are enabled on nightlies, and back in 2011 they were on by default.) [1]: https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/why-is-haiku-so-fast/6317 https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/why-is-haiku-so-fast/6317
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Is the difference algorithmic/architectural?
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    I'm not familiar with OS internals, but i believe having a system-wide consistent design (whole haiku is a monorepo) would enable you to simplify a lot of stuff. Also, many modern distros and desktop environments are bloated: you either have a choice between a full-featured, resource-hungry desktop (Gnome/KDE) or an efficient minimalist window manager (i3/sway). I believe the same applies to different parts/layers of the system. Haiku doesn't have the same feature set (yet) as full-featured modern desktops and doesn't have to deal with dozens of compatibility layers, so maybe that's also part of the reason it fares better.

by iamevn 5y ago

waddlesplash 5y ago

One of the other Haiku developers had this [1] response to an inquiry about why Haiku is so fast: > The system is not all that well optimized, uses a 15 year old compiler which does not uses any modern CPU features, and by default, the kernel is built in debug mode which makes it much slower than it could be. > How do other operating systems still manage to feel slower? I have no idea. (Those kernel debug options are no joke, they are a massive slowdown. The ones for the TCP stack alone take network throughput down to 1/5 of what it is without it; the ones for SMP, the virtual memory manager, lock facilities, etc. combined make the system visibly less snappy. We disable these on beta builds, but they are enabled on nightlies, and back in 2011 they were on by default.) [1]: https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/why-is-haiku-so-fast/6317 https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/why-is-haiku-so-fast/6317

nerdponx 5y ago
Is the difference algorithmic/architectural?
- southerntofu 5y ago
  I'm not familiar with OS internals, but i believe having a system-wide consistent design (whole haiku is a monorepo) would enable you to simplify a lot of stuff. Also, many modern distros and desktop environments are bloated: you either have a choice between a full-featured, resource-hungry desktop (Gnome/KDE) or an efficient minimalist window manager (i3/sway). I believe the same applies to different parts/layers of the system. Haiku doesn't have the same feature set (yet) as full-featured modern desktops and doesn't have to deal with dozens of compatibility layers, so maybe that's also part of the reason it fares better.