AmiWest 2015 post show Q&A

[ssolie]

Greetings!

AmiWest 2015 is over and it was a great time. Now post your questions/comments/queries and I will attempt to clarify what I said at the show.

Steven Solie
AmigaOS Development Team Lead

[ssolie]

Great presentation at the show. I found it straightforward and realistic. Thanks!

How strange. Usually people are reading between the lines and filling the gaps with all sorts of fascinating fiction.

@all
Seriously though, I am willing to answer any questions. This is a limited time offer because I need to get back to shipping a couple of important projects: X5000 and A1222. I don't have a lot of time for web forums these days.

[ssolie]

I've heard you have some sort of post 4.2 road map. Can you tell us something about what it contains?

Sorry, that is private info at the moment.

[ssolie]

i forgot to ask you this before i left, so i'll do here: what's the longterm plan for improving the printing architecture for AOS4? currently i can use modern printers, but only if they're postscript. the third-party photosmart driver also helps, but i max out at 600dpi.

is there any possibility of integrating something like CUPS?

We have not discussed printing internally for quite some time but it is still on the to do list. All I can say is that we will look into CUPS or whatever else makes sense when printing is revisited. Multi-core is the top priority right now besides the ports to new platforms.

[ssolie]

Any plans for an updated network stack/library?

None at this time.

Related: X1000 NIC driver? The legend tells there's one but that it has some nasty bug. Any more info regarding that?

When the driver is ready you will be notified. I'm sorry it is taking so long.

[ssolie]

1) Regarding A-Eon ALICE project, is Hyperion plan to increase the RAM & GFX memory of OS4 Classic ?

Not at this time.

2) Why AmiUpdate is no more used to deliver OS4 updates ?

Your assumption that AmiUpdate is not used to deliver updates is incorrect. Nobody said we won't use AmiUpdate to deliver updates.

We are simply preparing one large update for Final Edition customers instead of doing smaller ones.

[ssolie]

Do you plan on releasing info on some of the internal APIs so the the users can contribute in hardware support ? I'm thinking about the processor HAL and the Picasso driver API.

No, the HAL API will not be made public any time soon.

As far as releasing the graphics.library driver API, that has always been on my list of things to do but time is limited. If there is somebody that you know that wants access to the API please point them to http://www.amigaos.net where they can use the contact page.

Note that Picasso96 is gone and it is all just graphics.library now.

[ssolie]

One simple question... we can see x5000 AND Tabor with OS4.x in action before Xmass?

Of course A-EON wants everything released ASAP so we'll see what happens together.

Sorry but software development isn't an exact science.

[ssolie]

Does the X5000 have the same Xorro + PCIe X1 slot setup?

Yes.

Has there been any talks about a proper proto board for the slot?

You can buy them here:
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=1135

[ssolie]

We really are interested in getting some benchmarks on the X5000. Looks to be the most capable PPC board thus far introduced for our market.

Benchmarks can be very misleading (and troll bait) so Hyperion usually steers away from providing any.

I'm sure the community will be running plenty of benchmarks which you guys can use to compare and contrast when the time comes.

[ssolie]

-Thore and Jens allow all user to test OS4 MUI4 beta builds at their own risks. Why not do the same and allow ALL users to test OS4 beta builds ?

MUI is a 3rd party product with no commercial interests. They can basically do whatever they want. There is no warranty whatsoever and it is free of cost.

AmigaOS is a commercial product with shareholders involved that expect things to be done a certain way. If you'd like to beta test, you need to sign an NDA and be responsible for not leaking information to 3rd parties because they tend to use that information to hurt the corporation and thus the shareholders.

I hope you can now see the difference between the two.

[ssolie]

- is the work done under the hood to implement multicore will allow a better memory protection if not full?

Memory protection is always being kept in mind.

-I read that AEON is planning also a wiki, will you give them the dev docs for classics system since they're looking for dev to program new stuff for this systems?

You are assuming that Hyperion owns that documentation. The owners of the documentation would need to be contacted by A-EON and they will need to seek permission just as Hyperion has done.

[ssolie]

- is ExecSG at first was a straight port to C or was it written with multi processor / multicore and memory protection in mind?

It has always been in mind from the beginning.

- is the new Dos been developed with ressource tracking in minds?

Resource tracking is within Exec and DOS already. It is limited to memory at the moment.

-did you talk to Carl during the 30th anniversary or before about How Exec should be modified to support multicore?

No I did not. We usually talk about Rebol and other things. You have to remember that Carl wrote that a long time ago. He works at Roku now. He is also pondering another language.

-will AmigaOS take advantage of the TCP/IP acceleration features of the P1022?

Maybe. There are network accelerations in the Sam CPUs as well we don't currently use. Unless you are doing a router or a very high rate of messages such features don't give you much from my understanding. I prefer to ship first and optimize later anyway.

- did someone recorded the devcon sessions?

No, sorry. It was a great time. I was planning to blog a bit about it.

[ssolie]

...There seems to be vast room for cleaning up, updating and simplify a lot of things here. Are there plans to do so?

Yes, there are plans to clean up the prefs.