Actually there are no plans to include any sort of multi-core support in 4.2, simply because nobody has any idea as to what will be in 4.2:
http://www.intuitionbase.com/solie_irclog.txt
I recommend you take a long hard look at the answer to the question on [18:09:16] in that interview.
Funny to see how the bold and brave "4.2 features" is spontaneously devalued this way. "When Hyperion say 'ship something', we ship whatever we have". Yeah... :rolleyes:
I think it's obvious that there is no centralized plan, no centralized management anymore. Sounds more like they have adapted the AROS approach now, everyone works on whatever he wants, when he wants (on his spare time). And looking at what is actually being released it becomes obvious that hardly anything is happening anymore. The key feature of the last update (OS4.1.6) was a bump in the version number (a new version, yay!) and the bundling of AmiUpdate. There has been some work done on drivers, but that's coming from Acube/Aeon. Why? Well, Christopher Gutjhar (who I trust, and it seems he has some inside knowledge from friends of his in the community) has on a few occasions on various sites been mentioning that the OS4 developers are left unpaid (like:
here (
my reply)) much like the MorphOS Team was when Thendic France crashed and burned, resulting in the infamous "morphos.net" site hijacking and some developers leaving, and in a post he has even played with the idea of
using "amigaos.net" in a similar way in order to get rid of
"our version of 'the BBRV folks'". Not a bad idea, IMHO!
Once upon a time, the Friedens were the leaders of OS4 development. They were supposed to be employed and paid, and they were the ones managing all the OS4 development. After a lawsuit against Hyperion regarding missing payments, they suddenly kind of disappeared. I don't mean they stopped reading/posting in forums, but they are not the head of OS4 development anymore. Something changed. Instead "ssolie" (of all people) was brought in. He is not employed. And one of the first actions he took was to try to bring new developers on board ("
AmigaOS wants you") by appealing to anyone in the community to come and help out. Around this time they also started to talk about how AmigaOS was more of a hobby project, so I guess the newbies weren't exactly put on a pay-roll either.
I think this is a credible explanation to both the uncertainties regarding "OS4.2.0", as well to the dramatically halted OS4 development in general. Something is obviously not right in OS4 land, or to put it in a different way - the reality probably doesn't match very well
the appearance (the public facade) some people try so hard to put up.
And in the meantime people like Trevor continues marching in their own direction. At his own will, his own initiative. This is what happens when there is no centralized management, no grand masterplan for platform evolution. Anarchy. Hyperion promised things like SMP, memory protection, resource tracking and automatic stack enlargement a decade ago. Today also 64-bit would make sense. But to incorporate these things into Amiga OS, such drastic changes would be required that you could as well migrate to a proper desktop ISA (like x86) while you are at it. *Not* doing this would be close to madness. And then you will have a bunch of people who paid a truckload of money for underperforming PPC hardware that simply doesn't make sense anymore, and will also probably be close to worthless on the second hand market.
All IMHO of course!
