Haiku OS Now Enables AVX-512 Support, Other Hardware Improvements

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system now enables Advanced Vector Extensions 512 on capable Intel/AMD CPUs. A number of other hardware driver improvements were also merged for this interesting OS during the last month.

Haiku OS is out with their May 2026 status report. Below is a look at some of the interesting developments in recent weeks.

Haiku has seen work on its MMC driver to improve initialization and getting it closer to working and ultimately inching toward a state where it could be enabled by default. Haiku's I2C driver that is also disabled by default saw a crash fix affecting some hardware.

Haiku now has the "realtekwifi8187" driver as a poart of the "urtw" driver from FreeBSD to enable support for some older Realtek USB WiFi hardware.

Haiku last month also saw various ACPI driver fixes.

Over on the ARM side, Haiku saw some fixes for booting on the Raspberry Pi 5 but overall that latest Raspberry Pi single board computer is not yet in a usable state on Haiku.

Also notable with Haiku is its kernel saw changes to FPU handling to allow AVX-512 to be enabled on processors supporting it.

On the build system side, Haiku now supports the host compiler being the new GCC 16.

Then as far as the long-awaited Haiku OS r1 Beta 6 release, they have only a "small number" of bugs remaining before getting to that next release milestone.

More details on these changes for Haiku OS during the month of May can be found via their newest development report.