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Author Topic: Will OS4 have SMP after all  (Read 31743 times)

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Offline Blizz1220Topic starter

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Will OS4 have SMP after all
« on: July 23, 2013, 01:54:24 PM »
And what it will be like ?

I ask because I want to know ... :smack:
 

Offline eliyahu

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Re: Will OS4 have SMP after all
« Reply #1 on: July 23, 2013, 01:56:59 PM »
@Blizz1220

that's a good question. the truth is that only the AOS4 developers know the answer, and they ain't talkin'. ben hermans and ssolie both have talked about SMP in the past, but who knows? lots of MOS developers say it isn't even possible.

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Offline bloodline

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Re: Will OS4 have SMP after all
« Reply #2 on: July 23, 2013, 03:02:13 PM »
Quote from: Blizz1220;741758
And what it will be like ?

I ask because I want to know ... :smack:
I doubt OS4 would ever have SMP as there isn't really any proper SMP PPC hardware... AROS runs on SMP hardware and has run into the problems with the AmigaOS design that isn't really suited to SMP (and trying to make it work might actually be slower than a single CPU), but AROS is an open source research OS and as such devs have proposed various solutions which can be tested. Many of the design issues have been deprecated in AROS (for example the forbid() function) and exist only for compatibility with older software.

Offline Matt_H

Re: Will OS4 have SMP after all
« Reply #3 on: July 23, 2013, 03:08:39 PM »
They've said it's on the to-do list, but there is no timeline as to when it will be done.
 

Offline vox

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Re: Will OS4 have SMP after all
« Reply #4 on: July 23, 2013, 03:24:12 PM »
Quote from: Blizz1220;741758
And what it will be like ?

I ask because I want to know ... :smack:


Once AmigaOS 4.2 is out. Not before.
Future Acube and MOS supporter, fi di good, nothing fi di unprofessionals. Learn it harder way! http://www.youtube.com/user/rasvoja and https://www.facebook.com/rasvoja
 

Offline spirantho

Re: Will OS4 have SMP after all
« Reply #5 on: July 23, 2013, 03:48:04 PM »
My understanding is that AmigaOS is basically not great friends with SMP, because of the way that it works. For this reason, Hyperion are aiming at getting multi-processor support in without SMP - which is quite possible. I would imagine that they're aiming toward Aysmmetric MultiProcessing - which basically means (as far as I know - so please correct me if I'm wrong) that you have one processor core which does the system tasks, and farms out other tasks to other cores. Would people notice the difference between this and SMP? Probably not, especially on an OS as efficient as AmigaOS.
So, don't ask about SMP - ask about multi-processing, as SMP is just one type of multi-processing.

That's all my understanding - I don't know any more than anybody else... but that's what I've gleaned from the information around us.

What will it be like? No idea, but can't wait to find out!
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Offline wawrzon

Re: Will OS4 have SMP after all
« Reply #6 on: July 23, 2013, 03:59:13 PM »
Quote from: spirantho;741778
... especially on an OS as efficient as AmigaOS.
neither genuine amiga nor os4 i guess is so efficient in general as to justify that always repeated mantra. that about as true as that amiga is the best computer. there are areas where amiga is efficient in comparison to hardware it runs on, in particular on low memory machines with low res planar displays. but hardly there where all is based on linux ports anyway. everywhere where it is the case it will be about as efficient as genuine linux components or less, depending on quality of port.
 

Offline nicholas

Re: Will OS4 have SMP after all
« Reply #7 on: July 23, 2013, 04:08:29 PM »
Will OS4 get SMP?

Maybe, but not before A*** does.
“Een rezhim-i eshghalgar-i Quds bayad az sahneh-i ruzgar mahv shaved.” - Imam Ayatollah Sayyed  Ruhollah Khomeini
 

Offline billt

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Re: Will OS4 have SMP after all
« Reply #8 on: July 23, 2013, 05:22:54 PM »
Well, I hope for lots and lots of cores at some point. And at some point, with SMP putting them all on the same memory bus, that would not be good. So I hope they are considering something that is more friendly to much larger number of cores than SMP would allow to work well. If I had a T4240 laptop (yea, dreaming, but this is my current tought-project, how would I make one), I would not want a core sitting around waiting so long for all other ones to finish with memory accesses before it could proceed. I think there is a separate memory controller/bus for each cluster of 4 cores on T4240. (by core I mean 4 dual-thread cores, so that would think it is a cluster of 8 thread units)

Who knows if we'll ever see such a beast. But I do hope they are looking further beyond dual and quad core (single-thread cores) things that currently go with SMP. At some point, even x86 and ARM will have to step past SMP as well.
Bill T
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Offline OlafS3

Re: Will OS4 have SMP after all
« Reply #9 on: July 23, 2013, 05:44:24 PM »
Quote from: Blizz1220;741758
And what it will be like ?

I ask because I want to know ... :smack:

On a aros discussion I can remember I believe AMP as concept but only special programmed software (that means new or adapted) would benefit from it, the others would still run with one core. But I do not know if they (the AROS devs) have made any decisions.
 

Offline LoadWB

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Re: Will OS4 have SMP after all
« Reply #10 on: July 23, 2013, 07:50:12 PM »
It's interesting to see written here that the AmigaOS design is not SMP-friendly when I remember several articles written way-back-when which noted that AmigaOS was multi-processor ready.  I remember one of the articles was in the context of placement against MacOS.

Was the design and capabilities of AmigaOS over-stated back in the day?
 

Offline vox

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Re: Will OS4 have SMP after all
« Reply #11 on: July 23, 2013, 07:55:31 PM »
Quote from: LoadWB;741820
It's interesting to see written here that the AmigaOS design is not SMP-friendly when I remember several articles written way-back-when which noted that AmigaOS was multi-processor ready.  I remember one of the articles was in the context of placement against MacOS.

Was the design and capabilities of AmigaOS over-stated back in the day?

Well I believe statement was that AmigaOS 4 was designed in more SMP friendly manner with some features like new memory managment in oS 4.1 but not before, however I might be wrong.

My experience with SMP is that it enables better multitasking (Windows, Linux) but to be trully used it needs "threaded software" updates, so its not all up to OS. So its long road to go that just starts with OS feature introduced.

Even sharing of one core for OS other for apps, or one managing one running app, is an enhancement to not being aware of other core.
Future Acube and MOS supporter, fi di good, nothing fi di unprofessionals. Learn it harder way! http://www.youtube.com/user/rasvoja and https://www.facebook.com/rasvoja
 

Offline Blizz1220Topic starter

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Re: Will OS4 have SMP after all
« Reply #12 on: July 23, 2013, 07:57:40 PM »
It was multi-processor ready and it used 060 and PPC at the same time ...

It's just that all the educated people claimed that there is no way to do true
SMP support without basically writing new Os  (like TMHG said once) ...

But I guess there is nothing a man can't achieve so I'm open minded and
would like to hear how they plan to do it ...
 

Offline ssolie

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Re: Will OS4 have SMP after all
« Reply #13 on: July 23, 2013, 09:21:34 PM »
Quote from: Blizz1220;741758
And what it will be like ?

I ask because I want to know ... :smack:

Yes.

Whether it is a textbook implementation of SMP or not is still not clear to me yet. But that's just my opinion. I know Hyperion still calls it SMP and that's also fine.

So why all the fuss suddenly?
ExecSG Team Lead
 

Offline yssing

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Re: Will OS4 have SMP after all
« Reply #14 on: July 23, 2013, 09:39:24 PM »
Quote from: ssolie;741831
yes.

Whether it is a textbook implementation of smp or not is still not clear to me yet. But that's just my opinion. I know hyperion still calls it smp and that's also fine.

So why all the fuss suddenly?


awesome!!!