About multitasking, what's best : AmigaOS, Linux, or Winblows XP ?

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Piru wrote:
@tonydvb

I'm not sure how much of this is done by the Newtek cards but still running a video project in the switcher involves running a ton of processes at the same time. The Amiga does just fine doing that. There is no way a windows machine with as little ram and CPU speed could even dream of doing that even today.

I have to disagree really. Assuming you had the equal functionality in the software and hardware, I see no reason why equally specced windows box couldn't handle it. Windows itself requires larger memory footprint, but other than that it should be fine.

No it's not fine. Windows is tied and glued together, not designed with these features. I have had too many problems with Windows to call it fine.

[chsedge]

just to report what piru said at first (and to me seems one of few persons that knows what we are talking about)...


1. Linux

New 2.6 kernels have nice nice O(1) scheduler and kernel pre-emption.

2. Mac OS X

BSD scheduler basically, tried and tested solution.

3. Windows

I have no firm details how windows scheduler works, but I believe it's BSD variant, or at least acts very close to it.

4. AmigaOS

Very limited and aged round robin scheduler. Only pre-Windows 95 and classic Mac OS are worse.

[ptek]

Well, you can't find any co-operative multitasking OSes around anymore, does that answer your question? :-)

 

:lol:

[ptek]

@chsedge

4. AmigaOS

Very limited and aged round robin scheduler. Only pre-Windows 95 and classic Mac OS are worse.

So, from you answer we may conclude that the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga
entry saying that the Amiga has pre-emptive multitasking is wrong ?

[Piru]

@Speelgoedmannetje

Amiga hardware provided very efficient and cheap way of implementing video, but that's no OS feature. If you compare the OS multitasking (which this thread is about), pretty much all Windows since NT4 beat the crap out of AmigaOS. Thus, given equal hw features, Windows would be better.

Feel free to disagree. ;-)

[tonyvdb]

Piru wrote:
But why would you want to limit your video editing to something like the old amiga solutions? Or why would you deliberately want to run something like video editing on 10-15 year old PC?
Amiga hardware provided very efficient and cheap way of implementing video, but that's no OS feature.

There was defiantly OS involvement with video on the Amiga.

Its not a mater of limiting myself to a 15 year old machine but moreso the fact that spending another $12,000 or more on a new PC based system that will do the same thing is very pointless. All the software only video editing systems suck on the PC the new Newtek VT is one of the best products out there but why replace my Amiga when it is very capable of doing video editing all real time ( The Amigas ability to do what it does with Multi-tasking was way ahead of its time)

[Damion]

stopthegop wrote:

Hmmm... maybe a hardware issue? I shut down errant processes all the time, and aside from the occasional momentary hang, it's fine. Come to think of it, I don't think I've had to reboot windows due to a (software) crash in years.

Congratulations.  You own the only reliable Wintel box on Planet Earth.  I'm not talking about just one box that I own, I'm talking about literally thousands of different servers and workstations that I've worked on.  I do Field support work (15+ yrs) for a very well know storage systems company -- robotic tape libraries, disk arrays, etc..  In my experience, when customers report hardware problems (tape drives not being recognized, LUN mapping problems, unable to initialize robotics, unknown path to host, storage unit unavailable, etc, etc, etc...).  I could go on for days..  But the problem is almost always software, in spite of what Microsoft or anyone else says.  My experience is mostly with Veritas (sorry, Symantec) NetBackup,  Legato, Tivoli TSM, Comvault, BackupExec, Amanda, and some non-public proprietary storage applications.  Netbackup on a lean unix box is the best of many bad choices (read: windoze/linux).  

Well dude I'm not saying Windows is flawless, or that I love it, but what I am saying is that in my experience, if it's setup properly and maintained on good hardware it's a pretty stable OS... I don't think it's a fantastic multitasking OS, but as far as handling errant programs it's leagues better than Amiga OS (and Mac OSX, IMO). I don't work in the industry per se, but I maintain all of our work machines as well as constantly setting up various builds for friends and family, and no one I know is having continuous crashes and reboots unless there's a software configuration problem or hardware failure. Personally I spend about 99% of my time using my PCs and maybe 1% fixing problems. Obviously, as a tech, you will be dealing with problems all day, but it's kind of along the lines of the "if the Ford garage is full of Fords does that mean Ford is a bad car" analogy...  On the other hand, I don't see any reason why your home rig should be rebooting and crashing all the time unless there's a problem somewhere, beacause "by nature" Windows just isn't THAT bad.


edit--

Come to think of it, in the five or six months since I setup the new rigs at work, there hasn't been ONE crash or reboot yet.
 

[Piru]

@ptek

It's not wrong.

AmigaOS is has pre-emptive scheduler with equal priority tasks being alternated with round robin method. It's pretty much the simplest form of pre-emptive scheduler you can have.

[chsedge]

For me the question posed in this topic requires answers only from coders, and the ones who at least had been through an operating systems exam at university or have studied how to build an os...
comments from user perspective on the multitasking are useless as wikipedia (we can start a topic about wikipedia too)


ps:
anyway I'm the lucky owner of the second wintel stable system in the world, just running xp since 2003 with no reinstall and no crashes on an 'old' celeron.

[Piru]

@tonyvdb

There was defiantly OS involvement with video on the Amiga.

Care to detail the involvement?

[ptek]

OK I was not familiar with the round robin thing
tnx Piru

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Piru wrote:
@Speelgoedmannetje

Amiga hardware provided very efficient and cheap way of implementing video, but that's no OS feature. If you compare the OS multitasking (which this thread is about), pretty much all Windows since NT4 beat the crap out of AmigaOS. Thus, given equal hw features, Windows would be better.

Feel free to disagree. ;-)

Since a simple workbench fits on one disk, (880 kb), and since at avarage, 1 of 2000 rows of code contains bugs, how many more bugs do you think you have with a stripped compiled version of windows (wich is still a lot more megabytes) compared to a smaller workbench?

[Piru]

@Speelgoedmannetje

Since a simple workbench fits on one disk, (880 kb), and since at avarage, 1 of 2000 rows of code contains bugs, how many more bugs do you think you have with a stripped compiled version of windows (wich is still a lot more megabytes) compared to a smaller workbench?

Not enough to tip the balance over to Workbench. In fact, I haven't seen my XP install crash, except when the HW was malfunctioning. Windows is remarkably stable these days.

But since I've found dozens of bugs from AmigaOS, I guess it means bad things for Windows. ?-)

Windows has free (except network connectivity) updates, too. Any bugs found from Windows have chance of getting fixed, at least.

[tonyvdb]

Piru wrote:
Care to detail the involvement?

Outside video sourses no, but the video toaster for example uses the Amiga's video and NTSC capabilities in some sort of way otherwise it would not be able to display switcher or Lightwave screens on the Amigas monitor. All the software is run from the Amigas internal hard drive on Workbench. I many times will go onto my workbench as the toaster is running something and run other programs.

[Piru]

@tonyvdb

Since displaying genlocked video requires 0% CPU or system resources, I'd hardly call this AmigaOS feature.

Any OS with the equal HW could do this and provide equally good multitasking at the same time.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Piru wrote:
In fact, I haven't seen my XP install crash, except when the HW was malfunctioning.

Well, I did. And there wasn't any hardware malfunctioning.
Yet I haven't seen my Workbench (1.3) crashing.