State of the Amiga, 2007

[mrescher]

Nice thread - interesting reading.

Ilwrath wrote:

What the heck kind of logic is that?!  I totally agree, the VM model needs a massive rethink and re-tuning.

Nah the VM is actually a lot more clever than you give it credit for.  What it's doing is using idle cycles to swap out data that may need to be swapped.  This means that should an application need to be swapped out it's already written some or all of it to disk which like you said, is much slower than RAM.

I don't like the way some things have gone in the last 15 years - I'm a programmer and the form-over-function mentality sometimes gives me a headache.  People concern themselves with what it looks like and only when they're happy with the polish do they ask whether it works. What I'd do for the days that us nerds were revered with awe and people regarded what we did as purely magical.  Now people expect overengineered miracles, performed overnight for free. (or at least, cheaply)

That said I think you're undervaluing the leaps and bounds that have been made in this industry and as much as I enjoy my Amiga there is not a single application on it (including DPaint) that hasn't been replaced with something that, in the right hands, is better*. Things really ARE faster.  Sure it may be that you don't use 90% of features in a given application but someone does, and maybe you should learn some of them - remember the day you learned that you could copy and paste text instead of deleting and rewriting paragraphs?  Look, palette shifting is nifty, and certainly was a clever way of simulating animation on limited hardware but I can't honestly think of an application for this that wouldn't be better served by a more dedicated animation program.  I support the  use of the right tool for the job, and that may well be DPaint if that's what you're good at.

I do suspect, however, that if DPaint is the 'right tool for the job', there's someone who can do the job for you faster and/or to a higher standard in Photoshop (or Flash or 3D Studio etc.)  It would have to be a pretty exceptional job for this not to be the case.

My Amiga is great. It truly was the last computer I really had fun with (until I bought an A4000 on ebay, that is :-)) It's a fantastic hobby, but my work demands more than it can give.

* Oh, with the exception of GCC, which is ported from elsewhere anyway.

[mrescher]

Mallette wrote:

Perhaps you missed the point.  There is absolute no need for the VM, period.  I don't want "clever" VM, I don't want VM at all.  Any computer that cannot simply be turned OFF is asking for trouble, and I've had my share.

Yeah fair call - no I wasn't responding to your point, I was just pointing out to someone else that the way the VM worked was for a good reason not just dumbly swapping everything.

I don't think VM is to blame for not being able to just turn your machine off - for example you can use a linux "Live CD" with a swapfile or swap partition and suffer no issues if you just flick the switch.  Next time you boot the swap is reinitialized and you're good to go.

The issues all seem to be caused by uncommitted writes in write buffers when the power is pulled - lose the buffers and you lose a lot of performance - or daemons ('services' on Windows) that won't write their final status to disk unless asked to by a shutdown command.

The same is true on an Amiga though, you can really break something if it's writing a file when you turn it off.

I think you're right though - there's no equivalent in today's modern OSes. The closest that spring to mind are the embedded or portable OSes (PalmOS, WinCE), followed by the likes of MacOS that suspend cleanly (yeah, it's a bit like shutting down).  Does anyone else use an OS that you can "just turn off" other than your Amigas?

Does anyone know how AROS handles this?

[mrescher]

Mallette wrote:
I remember you could have any program use only RAM, RAM + HDD, HDD, HDD + RAM. Nothing like that has ever surfaced on the peecee.

There used to be "Ram Doubler" programs on the PC too but all the more modern implementations of OSes have VM built in. It's usually called a pagefile on Windows and swap on Linux, for example.  Linux will let you mess with its swapping strategy (allowing you to do the RAM, RAM+HDD, HDD etc) but you probably don't want to - it turns out that it's much better at memory allocation and optimizing VM usage than I am.

[mrescher]

Mallette wrote:
I don't mean what is now understood as "VM," which is neither virtual nor memory.  I mean VM, as in not distinguishable from RAM.  

GigaMem was totally transparent to the OS.  

Virtual Memory is memory that's any combination of memory physical, stored on disk etc. that's addressed as though it is all one piece of memory. Programs that run on the OS are not aware if they're being run in physical RAM or off disk.  

Correct me if I'm wrong, but GigaMem was transparent to the OS as it was a method for implementing virtual memory in an operating system (AmigaOS) that didn't already support it.  What I'm saying is that I think existing virtual memory schemes will work better than GigaMem ever could because they do work at the OS level and because the OS is better at slicing up the memory pie than you or I will ever be.

The one thing that I don't think I've seen done as well as on the amiga is the Datatypes.  This was an excellent idea - wherein everything that used datatypes could suddenly load a JPEG by dropping in the JPEG datatype.
I want to know why haven't we seen this type of advance outside the Amiga?  I think a lot of the issues are caused by vendor lock in.

Imagine if Microsoft released the Word datatype, then you could use OpenOffice or whatever you like and it would automatically understand Microsoft's Word format.  You could then choose the application you want on its features, performance or interface instead of having to buy the only one that supports the format your document is in.

The datatypes really were a brilliant invention.  I bought an A4000 on ebay and, as a result of datatypes, it understands PNG - a format that wasn't standardised until after Commodore sold their last Amiga.  That's pretty cool.

[mrescher]

Mallette wrote:
I've had Windows run out of memory when there was gigabytes of HD space left untouched.  There was no limit on GigaMem except available drive space and the OS limitations, which I think were 1gb.  I suspect you could have run every program available to the Amiga simultaneously in a gig.  I certainly don't understand what you mean by Windows handling it better.

I guess all I'm saying is that I believe you perceive Windows to be that much worse because it's trying to do a whole lot more. I don't meant to sound argumentative - Windows, MacOS and Linux are all heavier on the system than AmigaOS ever was but I'm just trying to be fair, they also do a lot more too - have a built in TCP stack, 3d acceleration, address more memory and hard disk space, drive higher screen resolutions, recover when applications leak memory - even under emulation they can run several instances of AmigaOS in isolation.  Most of the issues I see day-to-day are caused by bloated software, not the OS itself - it's miraculous that some of that stuff runs at all.  The main thing that kills performance for me on a modern Windows system is the virus/email-scanner-with-firewall-thingum but that's an ENTIRELY different story.

That's not to detract from how great the AmigaOS was.  I'm sure there are lessons that the modern OSes could still learn from it today.

[mrescher]

@Mallette
Hey that's cool. Completely agree with the sentiment, just not necessarily on the technicalities.

Good call on Ubuntu. Most of my work (like this lively post, for example!) is done on Ubuntu or Debian (on which Ubuntu is based). This laptop runs Ubuntu anyway and I do like it;

This is where Linux comes into it's own, since you can change what you don't like... you CAN stop it swapping if you really want to.
If you type

Code: [Select]

sudo swapoff -a

it will disable all swap until you reboot.

Code: [Select]

sudo swapon -a

to turn it back on again.  If you have tonnes of RAM and really want to make it permanent I can tell you how. (This doesn't make it any 'safer' to just turn the computer off at the power though).

I still say any OS that cannot be shut down with the power switch is an accident that WILL happen.

Yes. It does. Lots.  :-)

[mrescher]

Hey thought I'd bump this conversation up - this was an interesting comparison of a Mac Plus (not an Amiga) vs. a dual core AMD from this year comparing productivity on the two systems:

Mac Plus Comparison

Could be a good candidate for an Amiga comparison in future?