Thinking to change to the dark side (blue)

[KennyR]

I made the decision to switch to blue. I'd waited for OS4 for ages, and made a promise to myself that I'd only wait as long as May, 2003, to buy an AmigaONE. OS4 didn't arrive and didn't look like arriving soon so I gave up on the idea. I was set to get a PC with the money I'd saved, until Phenix came along and offered me a Pegasos for £200. It was too good to refuse. Since then I've had absolutely no regrets. MOS is everything I wanted and expected from a modern PPC AmigaOS, and the Pegasos hardware is brilliant - even with Articia.

A lot of people seem to believe that getting MorphOS or supporting the people behind it attack AmigaOS. They should realise that AmigaOS was last released in 1993 by Commodore. You can't attack it because it's dead. The current AmigaOS 4 is simply a PDA content company mistitled Amiga Inc and Hyperion's vision of AmigaOS. It is no more or no less bPlan's vision of it, or Bernd Meyer's vision of it, or AROS's vision of it.

[KennyR]

Yeah, strangely enough after distributing their flyers saying Articia is buggy, they then claimed it wasn't. Then they claimed the bugs that weren't present had been fixed by Mai and IBM. Then they claimed it was Linux's fault...

[KennyR]

ksk wrote:
>A lot of people seem to believe that getting MorphOS or supporting the people behind it attack AmigaOS.

Look at what Buck is doing. Don't you think he is a threat to AOS?
IMO: It is important that AOS is protected from being locked to a single HW manufacturer YET again.

No, I think being able to run OS3.x emulated on a PC for a fraction of the price with 99.9% compatibility with Amiga software (far more than MOS or OS4 manages) is the biggest threat to any business venture with the name AmigaOS, not Bill Buck. I think you've totally blown up this guy's significance, and indeed AInc's significance, and the bickering and legal spats between the two of them.

What Buck is doing is called competition, and this magical thing is best for the consumer in ALL cases. If OS4 cannot deal with competition then maybe it's better it died at birth.

>The current AmigaOS 4 is simply a PDA content company mistitled Amiga Inc and Hyperion's vision of AmigaOS.
>It is no more or no less bPlan's vision of it, or Bernd Meyer's vision of it, or AROS's vision of it.
Also you know that AOS4 is the evolution of AOS. Partly based on the same code. Same 68k binaries even.
Current MOS is a clone of AOS3.x for PPC + "extensions".

Yeah yeah, heard it all before. Then from the same people I hear that MOS is based on stolen source code. I wish people would make up their minds.

Truth is probably that the 68k asm was entirely useless to Hyperion. The autodocs would have been much more useful in making a PPC AmigaOS clone - and that's what it is, not a port. MOS is more compatible with OS3.x, so doesn't really make my thinking ridiculous. Yours, on the other hand...

OS4 is no evolution. It's the same as MOS - a PPC clone of OS3.x with 'extentions'. Funnily enough though, MOS's extentions make it more backward compatible. Whaddya know, eh? Must be that stolen source code.

[KennyR]

ksk, AmigaOS4 will not have the memory protection you seem to expect. I've never used it, and how do I know? Am I spreading FUD? No. It's a matter of the Amiga API. And the fact that it uses a shared memory address space.

OS4 keeps to the Amiga API for legacy. It has to, or it would just be a new OS with nothing in common but the name. But the downside of this is that real memory protection cannot be implemented, because AmigaOS was never designed for it. Amiga tasks and processes can be redesigned to care for MP, but in doing so it changes their structure and destroys compatibility. Sure you could use the MMU to hard-protect every task, and have linked lists track every resource, but the nature of shared addresses space (virtual or not) makes the overhead of this just too much to be practical.

QBox and Windows both took the sandboxing away to get around this problem (the 16 bit Windows layer *still* has no real MP). OS4 did not. Whatever memory protection OS4 will have, don't expect it to give you the peace of mind using bad apps under Linux or Windows will give you. It's just impossible to do without abstraction - sandboxing. OS4, like MorphOS ABox and AROS, will always suffer the "Bad app brings down whole system problem". It's a conceptual impossibility to prevent it, although you can lessen its impact in certain ways.

[KennyR]

ksk wrote:
Someday (after AOS4.1?) it might be possible to have more protection for new apps. Even in that case old 3.x apps might need to be recompiled / be run in a box.

You can't change the way apps run without breaking compatibility, I told you.

We all know how "fast" Windows/Linux is. QNX & BeOS are good examples that memory protection / boxing does not necessarily slow down the system. (I think, @ work & so far it kills the application, we have extremely tight realtime requirements...)

Apples and oranges. QNX and BeOS are not shared memory address systems. They use the Unix way of packaging each task into discrete memory areas like virtual machines. They can't physically overwrite each other's data. AmigaOS is not like that. Nothing that can have any compatibility with AmigaOS can be like that - without sandboxing.

Your previus information vas not valid. But that last one (above) is new to me. Hmmm... I do not figure yet how it would be any harder than in any other resource tracked systems.

Can you mention any resource tracking OS's that store allocated memory as linked list nodes? I don't know any. Such a thing is not practical.