Coldfire AGAIN

[AeroMan]

biggun wrote:


There is a market for AMIGA OS for a small system.
You can think of it as a Amiga-Joystick, AMIGA smartphone or AMIGA-Wii.
There is no market for a Desktop system anymore.
The Desktop area is fully saturated with Windows,Apple and now even Linux.

I really loved this Idea, and I do agree with you, but I think it would be nice to "leave the doors open" to be possible to raise the system in the future up to a Desktop level (if it is possible).

I'm not an expert in Coldfire. Do you think it would be feasible to have in the future more than one CPU in the same board, in a cluster-like fashion? Maybe talking with each other with fast Ethernet or a serial bus?

I believe this fills the other side of the problem. Let's say, you can have a sub US$100 device, and the software for it could even run in a big multiprocessor box. One could add boards with multiple CPUs to speed up the machine.

Amiga OS is multitasking, so we could distribute new tasks to different CPUs and do software that launch many tasks.
It would take the advantage of multiple CPUs when they exist

It is just an idea...

[AeroMan]

I do... :-D

But this thread made me look at Coldfire with a different vision...

[AeroMan]

Why all the discussions about doing something new to the Amiga deteriorates in no-one-wins Windows vs Linux vs Mac wars ? :-(

Yes, AmigaOS has no "memory protection", but for some reason those blue screens and lock ups keeps telling me that there is something wrong with Windows "memory protection"... :-D

Can we go back to Coldfire ?

[AeroMan]

Ok, I recognize it was my fault to express my frustration with Windows problems, and I apologize for that, even if I don't agree with you.

I promise not to be part in those issues anymore :-)

Can we go back to Coldfire ?  :-D It was getting really interesting...

[AeroMan]

I've never programmed a processor or microcontroller with MMU (unless you count PC code here, but I can't touch it), so let me ask to the MMU gurus here if my way of thinking is correct:

1: I suppose a task/process must be launched by the user or by the system at first instance.

2: The launched task may launch other daughter tasks if it needs.

Now the questions:

1: Am I wrong to suppose that the memory areas, will be shared only between the initial task, the system and the daughters ?

2: If so, why would somebody share memory with alien tasks for other purpouses than snooping ?

3: How often would software do this ? One per cent ? Ten ? One in a milllion ? :-)

4: Could we protect the memory in such a way that the task could only see what was allocated by itself and it's sub tasks ?

   This could work in a way like having the Amiga/AROS just for this task, and could avoid thrashing other tasks' memory.
   It looks fine for me, as it would ensure that a runaway task woud not mess with others.
 

[AeroMan]

Thanks for the explanation Bloodline,

One more question:


Would it be possible to treat memory under three different areas like this:

 1) System (system structures and stuff that wasn't previously allocated) - memory has no protection and everyone can see and modify it.

 2) Code (all of it...) - only system can play around with that. Let's sacrifice self modifyable code.

 3) Data (all allocated memory) - only tasks and sub tasks may modify it.

It is not perfect, but maybe it can improve a little bit the situation. ;-)

[AeroMan]

@ biggun

  Some posts ago, before the discussions about MP and related stuff, I´ve made a post asking about the feasibility to preview the use of many Coldfires connected together to speed up the things....
  The idea is to make it scalable, so it could go from a really small and cheap device up to a desktop with some software compatibility between then
  Do you think it is possible ? (please, check my post...)