BeOS-Inspired Haiku Now Supports Changing Audio Outputs Live, Other Improvements

In addition to August bringing the long-awaited Haiku R1 Beta 6 release, there was also a lot of development progress on this BeOS-inspired operating system too during the course of the past month.

Today the Haiku project published their August 2026 report to highlight recent development efforts, like continued work on Bluetooth HID support as well as Bluetooth audio support.

Also landing in the past month was support for live output switching in the Media Kit and media server code. But hot-plugging USB audio devices and the like aren't yet supported without a media server restart. The update on it reads in full:

"waddlesplash (plus also some patches from vighnesh-sawant) implemented support for live output switching in the Media Kit and media_server. Hot-plugs (e.g. of USB audio devices) still aren’t detected without restarting the media server, but after they are, it’s now possible to change the default system output “live” and it will take effect in just a few seconds, without restarting the media services. waddlesplash also implemented “auto-stop” of outputs when no audio is playing, reducing CPU, power, and other usage."

Haiku has also seen various improvements around USB support, power management continued to be improved for different platforms, and there is also support for USB 2 audio devices that still use the USB Audio 1 specification.

Haiku has also seen work on the x86 CPU feature detection code, various primitive kernel fixes, and build system updates.

When it comes to Haiku support across different CPU architectures, there has been further progress on getting the PowerPC build further along. Plus continued ARM64 enablement.

More details on the recent Haiku OS progress via Haiku-OS.org.