91bb4d0238
The original meaning of vfork is "fork, sharing virtual memory" (until exec). We don't implement that, and may never do so. However, since calling any functions besides exec() in a vfork'ed child is "undefined behavior", we can take advantage of that fact at least by not calling any of the pre- and post-fork hooks, saving a lot of page faults from copy-on-write. On one run of the "compile HaikuDepot and the mime_db" benchmark with -j4, the total waits count on the top two VMCaches by contention dropped from 62125 and 58927, to 52034 and 41225. musl apparently does more or less this same thing (vfork() is fork() but without calling any of the hooks.)
Haiku
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Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful.
Goals
- Sensible defaults with minimal configuration required.
- Clean, clear, concise code.
- Unified desktop environment.
Trying Haiku
Haiku provides pre-built nightly images and release images. Haiku is compatible with a large variety of hardware, but in case you don't want to "take the plunge" and install Haiku on bare metal, you can install it on a virtual machine (VM) instead. If you've never used a VM before, you can follow one of the "Emulating Haiku" guides.
Compiling Haiku
See ReadMe.Compiling.
Contributing
Haiku is a meritocratic open source project with a large variety of tasks. Even if you can't write code, you can still help! Haiku needs designers, (technical) writers, translators, testers... Get involved and help out!
Contributing code
If you're submitting a patch to us, please make sure you're following the patch submitting guidelines.
If you're having trouble finding something in the source tree, you can use one of our web-based source code browsers:
- https://xref.landonf.org/ (OpenGrok, provided by Landon Fuller)
- https://git.haiku-os.org/ (git, provided by Haiku, Inc.)
Contributing documentation
The main piece of documentation that still needs work are the API docs (found
in the tree at docs/user). Just find an undocumented class, write
documentation for it, and submit a patch.
Contributing translations
See wiki:i18n.
Contributing software ports
See HaikuPorts.
Contributing to our infrastructure
See Infrastructure.