Open Source Amiga OS

[nicholas]

I think memory fragmentation is a bigger issue, isn't it?  (Having so many different banks of memory, some slower than others can't be all that fun to write around in.)

Put this as the first line in your startup-sequence.

http://www.platon42.de/files/util/TLSFMem.lha

[NovaCoder]

It's  interesting to see what has happened with the Atari Jaguar's development since Atari went bellyup (everything was given over to the community to do with as they wanted).   Ok it's a console and it's user base was tiny compared to AmigaOS but it's still gives you an idea of what might have happen to AmigaOS if AmigaInk had been 'nice' and done the same thing after 3.9 was released.   For one thing I guess we wouldn't have AROS/MorphOS today, or at least AROS/MorphOS would be derived from OS 3.x source code.

If AmigaInc had managed the project in a sensible way (stop laughing), they could have used the open source branch of OS3.x to feed back into OS4.x development.

[slaapliedje]

It's  interesting to see what has happened with the Atari Jaguar's development since Atari went bellyup (everything was given over to the community to do with as they wanted).   Ok it's a console and it's user base was tiny compared to AmigaOS but it's still gives you an idea of what might have happen to AmigaOS if AmigaInk had been 'nice' and done the same thing after 3.9 was released.   For one thing I guess we wouldn't have AROS/MorphOS today, or at least AROS/MorphOS would be derived from OS 3.x source code.

If AmigaInc had managed the project in a sensible way (stop laughing), they could have used the open source branch of OS3.x to feed back into OS4.x development.

Exactly!  There is a (rather tiny) group of people that are still doing homebrew and releasing things for the Atari Jaguar.  I finally bit the bullet and bought Skyhammer and Robinson's Requiem for mine, but I'm on the fence of "Do I open them and play them, or do I leave them in the package for collector's reasons?"  I'm sure I'll eventually open them when I have time.  I don't really intend on selling my Atari stuff.

The beauty would have been if they released the source, that there wouldn't have been this huge in-fighting of "do we go x86 or do we support PPC, which Commodore may or may not have gone to after 68k was dying out.."  'cause simply, it could have gone both ways, or all ways, and we'd have it for ARM, PPC, PPC64, x86, x86_64, 6502... whoa, got ahead of myself there...  Well, why not, they put Lunix on C64

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Put this as the first line in your startup-sequence.

http://www.platon42.de/files/util/TLSFMem.lha

Thanks!  I did have that installed, due to Chaos Lord's suggestion, but it was before I thought my hard drive had died.  It was actually the IDE cable, but I didn't realize that until after I had already formatted it!

slaapliedje

[Mrs Beanbag]

For what it's worth, today I told my manager that some computer was running at 99.9% CPU usage and was crawling because of some java software that is simply supposed to do something like FTP files.  I made the comment, "He needs to write his software for computers that are made today, not 20 years from now."  I have already gone blue in the face from them re-writing something as simple as transferring files in Java, and using UDP... but that's a bit off topic...

I used to work with a guy who insisted that since everyone has 3GHz quad cores and 4Gb of RAM we don't need to worry about writing efficient code. But that doesn't even make sense, since if you're processing ever larger amounts of data it becomes more and more important that your algorithms don't run in polynomial time.

[Mrs Beanbag]

As far as I'm concerned, as long as applications aren't jerks, they should be happy together.  I think memory fragmentation is a bigger issue, isn't it?  (Having so many different banks of memory, some slower than others can't be all that fun to write around in.)

Fragmentation shouldn't be too much to worry about as long as programs aren't wont to request large blocks of contiguous memory, which I guess is fairly rare these days. On old stock Amigas you could legitimately request 50% of Chip RAM in one go but a few Gb, not so much.
 
Besides, if that is a problem, one could maintain a single virtual address space, which would get round the fragmentation problem without breaking software, and have a few other advantages too (swap space, seg faults if unallocated memory is accessed). But unfortunately the real problem these days is malicious code. Computer security is big business. It's sad that computers should have to be so much more complex and less efficient just because of selfish idiots, but there you go.

[cunnpole]

I used to work with a guy who insisted that since everyone has 3GHz quad cores and 4Gb of RAM we don't need to worry about writing efficient code. But that doesn't even make sense, since if you're processing ever larger amounts of data it becomes more and more important that your algorithms don't run in polynomial time.

There's a lot to be said for avoiding premature optimization especially if it comes at he cost of poor design, but I think that's taking it a bit too far. Reminds me of the Civ 4 updater that takes an hour to download the 100Mb patch purely because the process spends 99% of the time updating the bytes downloaded count I downloaded it manually from the same url in about 3 minutes...

[Mrs Beanbag]

There's a lot to be said for avoiding premature optimization especially if it comes at he cost of poor design, but I think that's taking it a bit too far. Reminds me of the Civ 4 updater that takes an hour to download the 100Mb patch purely because the process spends 99% of the time updating the bytes downloaded count I downloaded it manually from the same url in about 3 minutes...

There's premature optimisation, and there's long overdue optimisation.

There's also optimisation you should do before you even write a line of code. If you write the equivalent of a bubble sort to solve a problem it's never going to be fast no matter how much you try to optimise it later, and woe betide you if it becomes an issue two years later when it has become such a central point of failure that nobody dare touch it in case it changes the behaviour.

I used to get all the optimisation CRs in my queue but it was like trying to stop the tide coming in. I'd make the code faster and mark it as fixed, but by the time anyone got round to verifying it some other code got bloated and it was slower than before, so CR got re-opened and sent back

[slaapliedje]

I used to work with a guy who insisted that since everyone has 3GHz quad cores and 4Gb of RAM we don't need to worry about writing efficient code. But that doesn't even make sense, since if you're processing ever larger amounts of data it becomes more and more important that your algorithms don't run in polynomial time.

You think that's bad, I was talking to one of my coworkers who used to be on one of the programming teams.  Used to be because she was promoted to being a manager of a different team.  She was talking about having problems with writing a professional sounding email, and I said I didn't have any issues with that, it's math that I sucked at, which is why I hadn't ever gotten heavily into programming.  She replied, and I quote because I can't make this up...  "Programming is easy, you just copy and paste."

:laughing:

Of course this is at a company where they (the programmers) were discussing whether or not we should start recommending to our clients that they should have 8gb of ram minimum...

slaapliedje

[NovaCoder]

She was talking about having problems with writing a professional sounding email, and I said I didn't have any issues with that, it's math that I sucked at, which is why I hadn't ever gotten heavily into programming.  She replied, and I quote because I can't make this up...  "Programming is easy, you just copy and paste."

slaapliedje

I send most of my time copy & pasting when I'm coding, the skill is knowing what to copy & paste

[slaapliedje]

I send most of my time copy & pasting when I'm coding, the skill is knowing what to copy & paste

Ha ha, this is true.  But I already know how they tend to program.  From talking to some of the other programmers that used to work here, they'd see the 'lead' programmer duplicating the same function over and over again.  This is the same programmer that earlier in the thread I mentioned his java program taking 99.9 percent CPU and making the entire system crawl.  It's like running your Quake port on an 68000.  

slaapliedje