G4 Altivec - OS4 support?

Rogue with OS4 in later versions impliment any kind of memory protection?.. thats one of the main questions I have about it..also "in your opinon' will OS5 materialise within a year of OS4 like Bill says?... (hope I'm not asking for insider info here)

thanks in advance

[jd997uk]

@Mips_proc

IIRC, memory protection is in place, although _only_ for apps written specifically for OS4.
You will have to trawl trawl through the OS4 ML and read Rogue's posts to get the _real_ info though. He has gone into quite specific details as to how it works.

-john

[takemehomegrandma]

The_Editor wrote:

@ Rogue .... Little snippets of info like this  are VERY much appreciated.

Indeed. And another little snippet of info that would be very much appreciated is: "when" ...
 ;-)

[Orgin]

@jd997uk

Where do I join the 4.0 mailing list?

/Björn

[ksk]

OS4 list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/amigaos4/

[Rogue]

Memory protection on the Amiga is a bit of a topic really.
ExecSG so far has what we refer to as "weak" memory protection, that is, it protects unallocated areas, code, kernel memory, stack etc. I think you will find that the memory system is one of the most worked-on places in OS 4, we already have implemented quite an amount of feature, like said memory protection. There will be more technical details RSN.

About OS 5, I don't know. I have hope that our involvement ends somewhere in 4.x, although Operating Systems was one of the topics I studied at university, I really want to go back to what I really want to do - programming my own games.

[Panthro]

YAY!! AmigaOs needed heaps on memory to
get to the stage where Mem-protect was in place
new it would be a big job or a ...... well add-on :-?

great to hear :-? ....er read :-)  you hear again.org

.....oh yeah dont go to ANN.LU   I got burned for codeing amiga Os 4 wich was strange because I've
only just learnt about "hello world" :oops: and I dont recall codeing for any thing Os or otherwize :-?  :-o  :-?  LOL

>mmm but single software can have Altivec support, right?


Yes, I think so.

[JetRacer]

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Altivec just a fancy name for the maths processor in the MPU? If so, then Altivec is to PPC what the 68881 FPU was to the 68000.

If we're talking about the time when the x86 didn't have any real FP support, yes. As in MMX, no.

Altivec is basicly a way of introducing math paralellism. It's useless for speeding up most Photoshop type of tasks, but invaluable for FFT, Fractals, or software synthesizers (as in music). If you want to modify a buffer or a stream, without reading data from additional buffers or streams, then it's great. If not, then it's useless.

Let me clarify that. A software synthesizer crunches numbers like no other software. It takes a single input stream, like f.ex. a looped soundwave and modify it using variables that rarely change. One sample in. one sample out and many, many DSP-like operations inbetween.

Most people do not realize what kind of performance the simulation of a classic analog synth require. Playing a piece of music using a software synth pretty much demand all that a modern CPU can deliver. The Altivec changes that.