BeOS-Inspired Haiku Finally Sees Initial ARM64 SMP Support

The open-source Haiku operating system inspired by BeOS is now seeing multi-core symmetric multi-processing (SMP) support on ARM64 that works at least in a virtualized world. Plus an assortment of other improvements made to this open-source OS over the course of April.

Overnight the Haiku project published their April 2026 status report. Some of the highlights for the past month include:

Haiku in April saw more work on its Bluetooth implementation, MMC/SHDCI device work around powering off when there's no voltage range support, imported the zyd / zydwifi1211 driver from FreeBSD, and other hardware support improvements.

Haiku has also seen basic work carried out around SMP support for ARM64. This ARM64 SMP support is enough that it's working with a QEMU virtual machine at this point for dealing with multiple cores/threads.

For enhancing Haiku with desktop use-cases, the media mixer code has been refactored to delay start-up until an application actually connects to the output. This can help save time and improve CPU/power efficiency by avoiding work until the audio is actually going to be used. Automatically stopping the media mixer when no audio is no longer being output is not yet a reality.

For Haiku's CLI tooling, the ltrace command has seen improvements but not yet ready for general use. In part it's not ready yet as it can still cause problems and crash when it traces calls.

Plus an assortment of other improvements were made to Haiku in April. They continue working toward their sixth beta release of Haiku once additional bugs are fixed.

More details on these development activities via Haiku-OS.org.