| Headlines |
| 2025-09-16 |
Haiku improves the speed of storage access |
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The Haiku operating system gained some significant performance improvements when accessing storage this week, thanks to hard work by developer "waddlesplash" who took on the challenge of making disk operations faster. The results are impressive: "git status has long been, for large repositories, a much slower operation on Haiku than on Linux. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the most significant one is lock contention in disk caches.
Last month, waddlesplash spent a bunch of time refactoring the disk block and directory entry caching logic in the kernel to be able to use atomic operations rather than exclusive locks in the most common cases (reading an already-cached block, and inserting a new entry into the entry cache.) These sorts of changes are tricky to write and tougher to test (any bugs in them that aren't immediately obvious will likely be due to race conditions, and can usually only be found by analyzing code carefully, as all other means of trying to catch them generally change timing enough that they won't occur).
The results are clearly more than worth the trouble, though: in one test setup with git status in Haiku's buildtools repository (which contains the entirety of the gcc and binutils source code, among other things - over 160,000 files) went from around 33 seconds with a cold disk cache, to around 20 seconds; and with a hot disk cache, from around 15 seconds to around 2.5 seconds." Information on this and other changes to Haiku are available in the project's August newsletter.
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