DaNi wrote:
i dont mencioned the os4 ppc native, the first 4.0 beta is only 68k, the os4.0 ppc is a alpha version, not beta!
i am waiting a stable ppc version for amiga one of course =)
Certain modules were 68k; ExecSG is PPC-only, and as I understand it, all the really good stuff relies on the new features there and in related libs.
I discussed this with ... hoo boy, was it Thomas or Hans-Joerg? (I hate getting you guys mixed up as much as you probably hate me doing it!) ... and basically, it wouldn't be a simple job of pulling a known 68k-clean tree from CVS (someone would have to undertake all the MFCing* to pull bugfixes and finalized interfaces back into 68k-able code; lots of things targeted "PowerPC"** features from the get-go), and performance probably wouldn't be too hot anyway. (You can take that as "4 sucks!" if you want, but it really means "4 has to make tradeoffs trying to give people everything they want." MOS makes different tradeoffs, people will always be split over approaches, and it's PPC-only as well.)
So for that amount of work, AInc. would have to give the get-go, everyone likes to get paid, and it's better for the community if resources go to making 4.1, 4.2, 4.3-onwards kick a**. As nice as it would be to give the old machines a new lease on life, 3.x has technically done that anyway. (The existing OS architecture, warts and all, is a best-fit for the speed and capability of the Classic hardware... All that's really needed is a good IP stack, and if Roadshow isn't backportable, maybe AROS can prove its worth there.)
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*MFC = "Merge From Current," a BSD-land acronym. Means "integrating features/code from the 'top' of the development tree into older branches." It's just shorthand for a task... The actual work can be as easy as adding a simple tool (import 'helloworld.c' and makefiles into the older branch), or as complex as rewriting/massaging an entire 'OS' to handle a new API. (In BSD land: "Yeah, now that we've restructured the VM and VFS layer, we can MFC those filesystems into -STABLE.")
**Don't take me too technically here; I'm covering both 'things that actually require PowerPC speed or features,' and 'things that depend on other things that were built straight for PowerPC, such that there's no known-68k-able version of the dependency to just crosscompile without extra work.'