the AmigaOS 4.0 Features have been revealed!

[System]

its very good to see things are getting nearer and seems to be well and kicking.

my biggest concerns are solely about the webbrowser - none of the old amigabrowser cut it any more (and havnt for several years). a good move would be to get the latest build of mozilla running instead.

/stone

[System]

Actually, no.  According to Bill McEwan at the AmiWest conference, Exec SG is *still* in MC68K and *is being* ported to PPC native.  The following quote from Emanuel's show transcripts should clarify things

(Bill McEwan's first speech) So, what you get in the AmigaOS 4, and this will be all written down better than what I have here: Second generation Exec, it is written in 68k Assembly and it's being ported over to PowerPC.

:-(

[System]

I think this kind of wraps it up.  This is an extract of the phone interview with Thoms Frieden of Hyperion.  Also taken from the AmiWest 2002 transcripts.

T(thomas Frieden): Well, yeah, just recently we finished the ExecSG kernel. Well, "finished" is not really correct, we finished it in a state that is more or less the same [unintelligible] more than the original Exec. But right now we're also updating the memory subsystem, because we now have a purely physical memory system, but what we want to do is, we want to make the memory system virtual... Hello?

and soon after in the conversation, this . . .

T: Well, yeah, in the original concept we wanted to base OS4 mainly on emulation. For example, we wanted to have a purely native PPC kernel, but [unintelligible]  most of the modules as 68k and emulate them. But we found out that this solution is not the optimal solution. Of course it's not optimal, but it's lacking in a lot of parts... Some of the responsiveness that was one of the cornerstones of the Amiga operating system was lost due to this emulation. We decided that most of the important stuff has to be PPC as well. Additionally, for the first, we wanted to have a rather simple virtual memory system, something like VMM, more of... more like an add-on to the original system, but in the meantime we found out that even that would be not... It would really make the whole system more [unintelligible] , so we decided to go for a real virtual addressing scheme, and that is what we are currently working on [unintelligible] back to Exec.

Right.  So what does all this mean?  I guess taking my 2 posts together, and making some deductions about what was said we have 3 conclusions:

1/. ExecSG will definately be ported to PPC native as portable C(?).
2/. ExecSG is either not finished (still in MC68k) or is going to be used in OS 4.0 in a "good enough" state (also MC68k).
3/. *If* ExecSG gets used in a "good enough" state in OS4.0 (as MC68k), then no-one has told us *when* the PPC native version of ExecSG will ship, or if it will ship as an update (kernel patch?) or as an OS revision. (I prefer the former!)

Any opinions ppl?