What if everyone used AOS4, the rockin' debate and information revealing thread

[AeroMan]

Nlandas wrote:
All I need is

Firefox (Flash, Shockwave, Java)
Thuderbird or equally cool email client.
Movie player for (MP2, MP4)
MP3 player
Open Office
DVD/CD burning
(DVDRIP, MP2 recode to MP4)
and I've got everything that I really need.

...

I don't need memory protection, etc. I never had a problem using OS 3.1 it was stable, fast and if it actually did crash it took me a few seconds to reboot.

-Nyle

I agree with you. Most computer users today are actually just internet users (please add MSN and some torrent client..). With the basic apps, It could do it really nice, and lots of people would comment on how fast it boots compared to (name your favorite OS).

With all the "modern" features, I still see blue screens and have to reboot so many times. So, who cares about them after all ? They are not doing their job as they should :-D

Memory protection is a goal. Maybe OS5 (an OS4 sequel, not that awful thing A Inc talked about) could reach it in this dream world.   :crazy:

[AeroMan]

Hans_ wrote:

Trev wrote:
I don't see why memory protection would have to kill backward compatibility or necessarily make the system slower. What you might kill is interoperability between legacy and current software, but even that could be mitigated with the right design.

Full memory protection would require stricter memory ownership rules. However, old apps could easily be run in a sandbox.

Hans

Besides this, you need to load the MMU tables every task switch. This may be a big memory area, that´s why a slow down was mentioned.

Blitter and Disk DMA are also a problem, as they don´t pass through the MMU. But this applies only to the original hardware

(I have some crazy ideas about MMUs, but this is way off-topic...  :-D )

[AeroMan]

shoggoth wrote:

Shouldn't Blitter and Disk DMA be handled by the kernel anyway? I've seen this remark (blitter & DMA etc.) several times when discussing memory protection in this forum, but I'm under the impression that this is not catered for on other platforms either, since such stuff is not part of any user process anyway.

Yes, they should, but the software should not mess with other task's memory as well. This is why we have a MMU to protect them.

But a runaway task might set up DMA or Blitter to a wrong address, and it would end up writing someone else's memory. You can legally access blitter registers as long as you ask the OS to "own" it. You can't limit this without compromising backward compatibility.

This is Amiga-only hardware, there is no need to bother about it for other platforms. (well, as far as I know... please, someone correct me if I'm wrong)