One unified OS for the future?

[spirantho]

The AmigaOS devs aren't stupid. They don't just change and break APIs for no reason - it's far too much work to do unless they need to.
As a maintainer of an OS, the first thing you need to do is to take the code you're given (in this case a patchwork of M68K and PPC 10 year old OS3 code). Then you need to clean it up and lay the groundwork for the future of the OS (in this case SMP and memory protection). Only then can you actually start on the new technologies themselves. That's exactly what Hyperion have been doing.

Already we're seeing some of the fruits of their labour (e.g. the Extended Memory system for >2GB RAM which is one of the main benefits of 64-bit architectures). This sort of thing would have been much harder without the API changes.

I think many of the misconceptions surrounding Hyperion developers is that they're idiots. They're not. There are reasons why they do what they do (but they're not always obvious to the end user). They don't create work for themselves just for the heck of it. It's not in their interests to do nothing except break APIs - they need to keep pushing the OS forward otherwise they'll never sell another copy, and they're well aware of this.

[spirantho]

I wasn't referring to you, particularly, more to the whole feeling I get from other people on forums like this. Usually the same people who accuse AmigaKit of making lots of money on the X1000, as though they're all driving Ferraris or something (but that's a different argument for another day ).
SMP has to be transparent, otherwise it wouldn't be SMP. The difficulty will be getting SMP working without breaking binary compatibility, as you say. I suspect the solution would be to have "SMP-enabled" binaries and "legacy binaries" which can only run on the one core. I don't really know, though, I'm just guessing there.

[spirantho]

That's another question - is MorphOS with a new SMP API, a new ISA and no binary compatibility with 68k Amiga or PPC MorphOS actually MorphOS at all? Or is it another OS by the same developers?

It will be interesting to see what happens for both OSes, I think! Anybody doing an API switch is going to have to be careful (particularly if they go x86) not to just reinvent the good work the AROS devs have done.