Why Am I excited about Icaros?

[Einstein]

kolla wrote:

bloodline wrote:

Anubis probably won't amount to too much, but is is the only and best hope that the Amiga concept has to continue... Because of it I have spent a lot of time reading up about Unix, and you really have to see just how antiquated AmigaOS is!!

Surely you mean just how antiquated Unix is. :-)

If memory protection and security are antique practices and a task-switching utility API prohibiting those practices is the future then I must be living in wonderland

[Einstein]

 :horse:

[Einstein]

stefcep2 wrote:

People harp on about memory protection.  Back in the day, the most tangible outcome of this lack on the Amiga was that badly written program could bring the entire system down as each programs could occupy the memory space of another one.  But most programmers learned to write their software so that this didn't happen nowhere as much as you might think.

I must mysteriously have used software from a minority of programmers I take it ? that's a good one

[/quote]The security advantages of memory protection are over-hyped as memory protection is no guarantee to a secure system anyway:  Look at every incarnation of windows that has had memory protection: its THE most insecure system on the planet, always needing to be patched to cover this hole and that hole.[/quote]

Memory protection on its own provides no security, but stability. It's when mp is combined with resource access privilege checking that it shuts the door to malware trying to crawl in from the otherwise open memory.

Regarding windows security issues, what about linux ?

The underlying problem is that home OS's like AmigaOS and Windows and MacOS before it became a Unix GUI is that these OS's were never meant to be used on giant multi-suer networks like the internet and this where most of the security flaws result.  Conversely as a home computer OS the Amiga has huge advantages in ease of usability ( eg you NEVER NEED to open a shell if you don't want, Linux/Unix REQUIRES you to do it at LEAST some of the time),

Linux is a kernel. There's nothing stopping a linux based OS from providing GUI for any functionality you'd expect.
It's just that unix geeks have traditionally preferred CLI (aka shell) commands with cryptic and often unrelated names/options etc.

GUI speed, wonderfully-smooth multi-tasking,

The amount of times I needed to set some GUI based tasks priority to -1 just to have a responsive keyboard (and other apps) is uncountable.

fast boot up time.

And faster crash down time.

Why can't these things be implemented as well in a system with memory protection?  Does memory protection require the sacrifice of these things?  Why does a core2duo running at 2.8 ghz with 3 gig ram stutter to draw a left mouse click menu just because its loading a web page?

Be glad it does not go down and take all your current downloads and other data with it.
Also some browsers utilize multi-threading badly, or (almost) not at all.

There's still a  lot to like about AmigaOS, and computer OS's haven't come forward nowhere near as much as the hardware they run on.  In fact Windows, Mac And Linux OS programmers should be ashamed.

BeOS which implements/-ed memory protection, and even more, QNX, which does that plus security haven't been accused of being unresposive (me exluded, haven't used any of them). So why should the three named mainstream OS learn from Amiga when all it does is next to nothing:

* No user mode/supervisor-mode context switch upon entering exec (exec is a library that is called like a library, but when it absolutely must it triggeres the cpu to enter supervisor mode
* Passing pointers, the IPC simply adds the message nodes to which the pointer points into the massage list (port)
* Scheduler completely discriminates and starves tasks as long as any higher priority one has an appetite for over-consumption
* No virtual memory
* And I must have forgotten (and be nonaware) of tons more.

Like I said, exec is a fancy task-switching utilty API

[Einstein]

stefcep2 wrote:

It depends on what software you used.  PD can give you a guru, most commercial software I used was fine. Memory protection still doesn't prevent freezes and hangs, screen corruption,they still happen eg nvidia drives with XP/Vista

No, I almost never used PD.
Umm, it's really comical when people continue beating the dead horse over and over and over... forever... :crazy:

What's next piece of news, that no OS has memory protection because kernel code can crash the system ?
You might want to update yourself on memory protection, kernel space, user space, and processes.

Linux is said to be more secure but thats probably because its less popular (and not as hated as MS is).  It doesn't attract as much malware development, doesn't necessarily mean its more secure, but it might..

You also forgot that linux is Open Source, and people wanting to stay away from malware tend to be using distributions. There you have two valid reasons why there should be far more malware for linux systems than there appears to be at the moment.

You can't infiltrate a proper implementation of a good design, but a faulty implementations by a coder you can. Now, as long as coders properly implement system components, it won't matter how bad code the application developers write.

Heard that argument a billion times. Thats a cop out.  Why?  Because it hasn't happened. In 20 years. Linux needs to be assessed on what it is NOW, its had 20 years to mature, not what it COULD BE, if someone gave a rats at some indeterminate point in the future.  Theoretically it *might* be possible to have an intuitive GUI for every function that a user might need to use, but NOT ONE DISTRO provides such a system.  Tried all the big guns: Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora, SUSE, ALL REQUIRE eventually that you get your hands dirty with CLI.  You CAN'T escape it.  Linux is still a command line OS with GUI tacked on top of it, no matter how its dressed up.  On the other hand Workbench and CLI are two sides of the one coin.

You are talking about a *distribution*, realize a distribution contains tons of software packages needing to be configured with tons of configuration utilities, usually that's the shell commands on linux, nothing prevents GUIs for those, and nothing prevents rewriting any fundamental CLI command to a more amiga-like look/syntax if one must either.

Really? What in god's name are you running?  I've run ImageFX, and lightwave renders, whilst typing up an essay in Wordworth, and i couldn't out-type Wordworth on a 40 mhz '030.  Oh I was IRC'ing at the time so a TCP stack was going as well and had YAM open..

Good for you, not everyone could afford those luxury hw.

And you want to improve it more?  Download Executive for free and customize task scheduling to suit your needs.

Like that doesn't add overhead. And still no mp, no vm.

fast boot up time.

And faster crash down time.

Blue screens happen at ghz speeds, GURU's at MHZ...

GURUs can happen by any piece of code in any part of ram at any time. "Blue Screens", which I have never personally had the pleasure to meet, are unsurprisingly only limited to "supervisor" code, those are running in the kernel, and far far away from userpace application processes.

Also some browsers utilize multi-threading badly, or (almost) not at all.

Oh you mean the programmers haven't yet learned how to program their software in a system-friendly way so that they make way for higher-priority system tasks like responding to a command issued by the user to open a Start Menu?  Why doesn't the OS over-ride this? Isn't it a PRE-EMPTIVE multi-tasking OS as opposed to a co-operative one?  Why does the OS allow an application to take priority over system tasks?  Also its OK when programmers program badly on Windows, thats the programers fault, but not when they do it on Amiga, thats AmigaOS's fault?

Oh *start* menu huh ? You could've included the word start and not making me think you are talking about the browser one..
Since when have I defended windows way of implementing things.
Also Explorer, although a system one, is still an application process. Like I wrote earlier, I had to set a task priority to minus -1 in AmigaOS to ensure other app's (who happened to for the most part be io-bound) to get near-instant schedule, I don't remember the names after all these years, but on AROS last time I tried it (more than a year ago) at least ScummVM (set task to -1) and Lunapaint (slowed workbench menu down alot of times).

:lol:

You know nothing about Exec:

You mean I know less about exec than you know about NT kernel ? comedy !

its employs true pre-emptive multitasking

Yea, it initializes the interrupt vector table to among other things point to interrupt/exception handlers, and initializes the hardware (the timer included) to gain it's pre-emptive task-switching functionalty (that's hard man and offourse initializes it's "subsystems" mm, ipc, whatever, but only to export most of it's services as library functions. Only sitched to supervisor mode upen exceptions/interrupts and when itself needs to.

, and its scheduler will only "starve" tasks if you prioritize something to an extreme: no programmer in his right mind would do it that way, but if you want you can try. And even then the system will still be responsive to the user as system tasks are prioritised highest anyway.

Thanks for the lecture, tell me something new. But it's not about prioritizing to extreme or not, but that cpu-bound tasks with piority 0+ will cause serious problems

Task switching is what you got in Pre-OS X days on Mac, and Win 3.11 days.

oO what are you talking about ?

Since then Windows has had pre-emptive multi-tasking but its not as responsive as AmigaOS Exec, not unless you have a factor of 1000 more ram (thats why Win and Linux NEED Virtual memory, ) and CPU cycles.

ok.

And Amiga doesn't have virtual memory because it doesn't NEED it.  I've never run out of RAM and the most i had was 128 meg. But if you want it can be done, you could buy
GigaMem to do it...

Software provides more funcionality with time, resolutions increase, modern kernels have page tables and other contexts that need memory, they have services (many really unnecessary) that need memory, when you add all these to amigaos it won't stay as small anymore.
But sure, like I said, many services in windows as an example are unnecessary, I've turned off several with increased memory and cpu performance as results, i need to turn off a few more..

I stand by my earlier conclusion  Windows OS, OS X and Linux OS programmers should be ashamed at the total misuse of hardware resources in creating the worst user-experience versus computing power in the history of computing.

But AmigaOS due to its many incapabilites cannot provide many of these experiences at all.

But, give me a free AmigaOS (say AROS fork) with full mp, even in form of segment based single address space, and I will be over it would be a nice simple OS on laptops. But then there is Haiku/Syllable, though i prefer C over C++ :/

[Einstein]

stefcep2 wrote:

Wrong!! 90 % people intending to stay away form malware use Windows and buy security software.  Its a fact, no matter how dumb that may be. Now consider that writers of malware must have a MOTIVATION to write malware eg to steal personal information from users for gain, and in this case 90-95% of computer users use Windows, which OS would they target for vulnerabilities?  Windows ofcourse,  as there is better chance of success. So not as much effort goes in to exploiting Linux potential vulnerabilities.

It still doesn't provide a valid cause to why there's not alot more malware for linux based distros. Since users are many that switch to linux based distros for security, it means alot of these would have something "to hide", if I were to write malware I'd probably be trying to target linux at first for the reason I wrote above, I'd like to take people by surprise, if I was evil that is.

No system is foolproof, forever.  Given enough time and desire ANY system can be breached.

Systems *can* be foolproof.
But the issue is how much obstacle you put in the way of malicious coders. In the case of AmigaOS there's no obstacle, not for malicious coders, and not for cincere coders.

I know what a distro is. But, oh I see, users should not use a distro, but compile Linux themselves and write GUI's for all of the operating system functions, and any software that doesn't have a GUI.  Real user-friendly that is.  You *could* do all of this, and someone somewhere at some point time *could* make Linux a totally GUI driven system.  But 20 years later NO-ONE, ANYWHERE has.  The point remains:  Linux is all about what it *could* be, but in reality never *will* be.

*Never will* is so prophetic...

Luxury?  Its clear from this post and your posts about Exec that you are a relative newcomer to Amiga.

Ok.

Yep all of 250k RAM and NO additional CPU overhead. See again: you don't get Amiga. You have a Win/Linux POV on things.

Apparently you don't get code than if you think adding "smart" behaviour to a completely dumb scheduler like original exec (or any other software) adds no overhead.

Oh *start* menu huh ? You could've included the word start and not making me think you are talking about the browser one..

See you miss the point again:  In a good pre-emptive multitasking system the OS decides who gets what share of the CPU time, not the Apps.

[/quote]

You know what multithreading is pal ? you don't think multithreading is automatic right ?
If your problem would be about the private browser menu and that caused responsiveness problems when the browser loaded a page you don't think the scheduler is to blame do you ?

Pushing a mouse button to make a menu appear is a basic OS FUNCTION, not a basic Application function:

You are saying applications cannot provide their *own* menus ? you think apps cannot provide whatever kind of widget/menu they want in their own client areas (as they are known in windows) ?

the OS ought to give priority to this before rendering a fricken' web page!!

Not if theres nothing to prioritze since in the above (my) scenario the OS would not *know* of any app private menus

A start menu ought to be an even higher priority OS function than an Application menu: the fact the Start menu stutters when downloading a web page is therefore an EVEN worse indication of a poor multi-tasking system. And this all happening on  multi-core, muti-ghz cpu with gigabytes of RAM!!!  Its NOT about multi-threading parts of an app to run separately in separate cores in separate memory spaces, its about good pre-emptive multi-tasking DESIGN of the OS

Pal, multithreading is not about core utilization only, it's about strict and simplified scheduling of different parts of an application code (and software that create threads within a process's schedule for the functionailty they provide), (the scheduling) provided by the OS.

Oh yes and Linux is a multi-tasking fiend??  As a server yes, as desktop? Yeah right: wasn't that long ago that playing an mp3 would stop the mouse pointer from moving. On a 1 ghz 512 Mb PC.  A joke.

You mean the mouse pointer isn't handled by the sprite hardware like the amiga, ok..

But generally (AFAIK) the linux schedulers were optimizes for throughput rather than responsiveness.

Which in a good Pre-emptive multi-tasking design would be prioritised ahead of other apps, but isn't.

Now I have no idea what major problems it is for you, but despite my 512mb 2.4 ghz system i don't have problems opening the start menu when loading a page.
I just loaded a big flash riddled page, and opened multiple times while loading, I see no probs.

Not sure what you were doing, but 3D rendering is as demanding task you can get and as I've said a 40 mhz 68030 didn't lock up the system doing a lot more besides.

3d ? no 3d

You are confusing me or yourself:  AROS DOES NOT RUN AMIGAOS and doesn't run Exec, except under emulation through UAE AFAIK....

I must be confusing you, unless AROS' Exec together with ScummVM and Luna ran under WinUAE at that time..

, and its scheduler will only "starve" tasks if you prioritize something to an extreme: no programmer in his right mind would do it that way, but if you want you can try. And even then the system will still be responsive to the user as system tasks are prioritised highest anyway.

Yes, but YOU implied that Exec was to blame for "starving" tasks of CPU time, when you NOW agree it was the programmer or user setting things that way.

I made an edit, read the edited paragraph.

Task switching is what you got in Pre-OS X days on Mac, and Win 3.11 days.

oO what are you talking about ?

i am talking about the fact that pre OS X and Win 95, MAc and Win did NOT have pre-emptive multi-tasking: they used a simple task-switching implementation.

What do you think task-switching is ? switching tasks offcourse, who talked about MacOS, Win 95, and preemptivness or absense of it ?

It will ALWAYS be smaller than the Win or Linux or OS X.  AND it won't get slower the longer you use it...

Ok.

But AmigaOS due to its many incapabilites cannot provide many of these experiences at all.

Its all relative, innit? At the moment on a relative scale, the improvements in software functionality relative to the hardware advancements are about 1 to 100.  Thats the REAL tragedy.[/quote]

Ok. despite my now old system I'm not remotely experiencing these problems your screaming about, save for the swapfile which I should be doing something about if I had a spare partition.