The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project published a new blog post to outline some of their latest development activity. One of the areas they have been focusing on in the performance department has been for addressing much slower git status performance compared to Linux.
Running git status on a large source repository from under Haiku OS has been “much slower” compared to Linux. In large part due to block caching differences. Enhancing this caching logic will also hopefully help other workloads too.
In Haiku’s blog post covering their August activities they highlighted the impact of their optimizations thus far:
“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.
This is still a ways off from Linux (with a similar setup in the same repository, git status there with a hot disk cache takes only 0.3 seconds). Performance on Haiku will likely be measurably faster on builds without KDEBUG enabled, but not by that much. Still, this is clearly a significant improvement over the way things were before now.”
During the month of August they also made several application fixes, refactored their USB disk driver, added support for some Intel Apollo Lake integrated graphics devices, refactored their USB3/XHCI driver to submit some kinds of transfers directly, various file-system fixes, and other improvements.
More details on these recent Haiku changes via Haiku-OS.org.
