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

[tormedhammaren]

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.

@Piru
Windows really should be stable these days giving that Microsoft has a zillion dollars... In my opinion the free unices (Linux and the BSDs) is the most stable OSes for personal users. This is based on own experience using them for both desktop (different Linux distributions) and servers (FreeBSD and Linux).

It's funny learning about the AmigaOS. Ok, it's dated, without modern memory management that would make it a lot more stable and using 80-s state of the art technology (like pre-emptive multitasking using the round rubin scheduling algorithm), but it makes me wonder that one of the DragonFly BSD (Matt Dillons baby) design goals is to make the BSD architecture more Amiga-like.

[tormedhammaren]

but the reason is seems so resposive, is because the applications are also of a small footprint.

Responsiveness in AmigaOS is also linked to the fact that it's a micro kernel architecture with a message-passing system. Passing messages on the AmigaOS is just passing pointers (very fast). This is why it's hard (or impossible) to implement full memory protection on the Amiga.

[tormedhammaren]

The good old virtual memory/memory protection discussion! Can't get enough of it. :-)

I wonder how responsive AmigaOS would be on a 7 MHz 68000 with memory protection? It would be slower (cause then message passing wouldn't be just passing pointers, but data). So, it's really not a drawback, but a design choice giving that the OS should run fine on 7 MHz 68000s.

CAOS (the original AmigaOS project) was to provide better memory managment than AmigaOS does (based on TRIPOS). Read here: http://www.thule.no/haynie/caos.html.

[tormedhammaren]

that link appears to be broken.

Just remove the period. Like this:

http://www.thule.no/haynie/caos.html

68000 doesn't have MMU nor possibility to use external MMU 68851.

Thus 68000 can't have memory protection.

Yes, I know (didn't think twice before posting) but what if it was designed for 68010s with MMU instead (and virtual memory and memory protection capabilities) instead?

[tormedhammaren]

It looks like Billie boy actually never made the claim:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.folklore.computers/msg/99ce4b0555bf35f4