What is memory protection and why is it so hard to implement for the AmigaOS?

[sim085]

Hi,

I was reading the AROS FAQ and came accross the following;

Several hundred Amiga experts (that's what they thought of themselves at least) tried for three years to find a way to implement memory protection (MP) for AmigaOS. They failed. You should take it as a fact that the normal AmigaOS will never have MP like Unix or Windows NT.

So why is it so hard to have memory protection for the Amiga? Is there anywhere where I can read more about this?

[sim085]

So in other words memory protection is not possible to implement because the developers of these operating systems (AROS and AmigaOS) want the OS to be backward competible (allow software from 3.1 to run) right?

[sim085]

So if they drop backward compatibility and decide to re-do the kernel then they can include memory protection right!? Or there is something in the AmigaOS philosophy that still makes this a hard task to achieve?