How to move AROS forward

[Piru]

@yakumo9275

the stock mini has barely any video ram onboard (some models 32mb some 64mb), and upgrading that is a nightmare,sice you cant just stick in a pc agp card, you need one with a mac bios (afaik...). different cards manufacuters use different ram chips so a mac compat bios is not often easy to get etc.

Excuse me but where exactly are you going to plug this AGP card?

[Piru]

@HenryCase

You can't in any sensible way intercept the pointer usage, so the question is irrelevant. You can't "flag" or any other way know when the app is using pointers and/or if it's using pointers correctly or not.

You can't have MP with AmigaOS, get over it.

The best limited MP hack for AmigaOS is MMULib by Thomas Richter. It has a MuLink tool that can write protect certain segments of the executables. Obviously the program in question must be compiled to take advantage of this (basically only code and read only data can be protected etc). This is far from full MP however.

[Piru]

@HenryCase

So I'll ask again: is it possible to write a program that can scan the binary of another application and know when a pointer has been set?

And I answer again: No.

[Piru]

@HenryCase

Bingo. CPU emulation is part of my plan. Yes it is too slow to use for running programs in real time, but it can be used to construct a 'map' of the program. This 'map' would only need to be created once, but would then be used by the operating system to help guide the program execution at key points.

No, you can't do that. It's not possible to somehow trigger the program to take all possible codepaths. Thus your map will always be incomplete and thus totally useless (and I'm not even going into how you would automagically be able to fix the programs, which you can't either).

As soon as the program takes codepath it didn't while mapping your concept fails.

[Piru]

@HenryCase

let's start discussing how to graft full MP into AROS through program compilers.

MP is not the task of the compiler.

Would there be any way to make AllocMem (and all other AROS functions) behave as they should without using pointers (maybe using some new 'port' system instead that AROS could flag and control)?

Even if you could, the actual poking can be in the code, not the OS itself. The code needs to be rewritten, compiler can't possibly know how to do that for you.