One unified OS for the future?

[OlafS3]

I agree with Amigadave. The situation has improved in recent years with  many updates in the different camps and new software. Of course there is  a lot of to do and everyone can help, f.e. donating to bounties, help  testing and giving feedback to developers, make documentation like  tutorials for software, for optimizing and configuration of his  preferred OS and much more. There are always popping up new threads  requesting this or that from OS devs or the "community" instead to think  about what they himself can do. That sounds a little lazy to me,  instead making unrealistic requests people should do something himself.  That was what I did, I never expected anything from others and always  did what I could do myself (and will do that in future).

To the  topic, it is much too late for a "unified OS" because there are both  technical, legal and emotional reasons why this will never happen. What I  personal hoped for was that the camps would agree on a common  infrastructure to avoid unnecessary double work and speed up development  and make it easier to crosscompile. Common are (in my view)  PCI-support, USB, most of the system libraries and GUI system. The  sources should be opensource. All user-related components like desktops  and addons that are new and specific could have stayed closed. But I  understand now that even this idea is unrealistic. So people should  concentrate on what they have and help there.

[OlafS3]

@OlafS3

You mention something which would be very useful, actually.
I can see that for many parts, there are similarities rather than differences, but for some bits such as the PCI and USB that you mention, the APIs are quite different. If they were standardised across platforms it would make driver development much easier across platforms. Even graphics APIs are separating more and more now.

We should celebrate the differences in the underlying OS between MorphOS, AmigaOS and AROS, while striving to keep software flowing on all the OSes... but as the APIs move away from each other this will get harder and harder.

Ideally I would like there to be an independent "Amiga-like" council which would define APIs - each OS would contribute submissions via RFCs to the multi-platform council which would then ratify or deny that submission before it became standard.

This could never happen, though, because each of the OS owners would say "Why should we? We're a different OS - we're not responsible for the other OSes. We'll do what we like, thanks".... plus in my experience there would be precious little agreement about how the APIs should work - but it would be nice.

I have a alternative idea. In "normal life" I am programming on Windows using Delphi in different variants and Visual Studio. Common is that all are based on class libraries that hide the internals. As a application programmer I do not care about Win32 or other APIs, I use the classes of the library. The only chance I see (besides standardizing the APIs) would be to use a kind of Amiga class library that hides the differences so you could crosscompile a source without needing to make specific changes. The only problem is you need that for every language and you need experts who adapt the needed changes for every platform. I am myself (as written) a Pascal fan so Free Pascal (that is now available for 68k, Aros X86 and MorphOS, for AmigaOS there is a older port available) are first choice but that is a personal thing. Amiga-E is a good candidate too with many includes available and of course C. Solutions like Bytecode similar .NET are propably too complicated to do.

To the idea... the class library(s) should be open source so everyone can contribute. The big advantage... easy to crosscompile and changes would only be needed one time (in the class librarys) and not in every application. And it would be easier for outsiders to start on the platform.

[OlafS3]

@OlafS3

The other problem with abstraction layers like that (or even bytecodes like .NET) is that of speed. We will always suffer from a lack of speed compared to Windows machines, and as programs get heavier and heavier in their resources it's going to become more and more impractical. We need to grab as much power out of our "Amiga" machines (whatever they are) - the primary advantage we have is that we have much more lightweight operating systems. If we go the way of bytecode and abstractions we lose that strength entirely.

Abstraction is great for porting software, but useless for ekeing the most power out of the hardware, which is especially necessary for Amiga-like systems (particularly so when porting MAME, trust me )

yes abstraction has some cost but in my view the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. One big advantage is that there is a higher chance that developers from outside start with it. I have contact to a lot of former amiga-developers that were known for their projects. Unfortunately most of them have long left the platform and are not interested to return. For a real new developer with no previous experience the learning curve is very steep, the start difficult (missing modern development environments, not enough documentation, not many tutorials, no class libraries and so on). If they could use at least a standardized class library start would be much easier. It would be even useful to have a standardized class library that is implemented for different languages so you could transfer your knowledge and would only need to learn another language.

Might be that there are very specific projects that need every bit of power but for most applications that would not be a problem. Bytecode was only one example for crossplatform development, it would be too complicated to do and needed too much manpower for our small community.

[OlafS3]

@OlafS3

You mention something which would be very useful, actually.
I can see that for many parts, there are similarities rather than differences, but for some bits such as the PCI and USB that you mention, the APIs are quite different. If they were standardised across platforms it would make driver development much easier across platforms. Even graphics APIs are separating more and more now.

We should celebrate the differences in the underlying OS between MorphOS, AmigaOS and AROS, while striving to keep software flowing on all the OSes... but as the APIs move away from each other this will get harder and harder.

Ideally I would like there to be an independent "Amiga-like" council which would define APIs - each OS would contribute submissions via RFCs to the multi-platform council which would then ratify or deny that submission before it became standard.

This could never happen, though, because each of the OS owners would say "Why should we? We're a different OS - we're not responsible for the other OSes. We'll do what we like, thanks".... plus in my experience there would be precious little agreement about how the APIs should work - but it would be nice.

I think the OS devs make there a big mistake. From my outside view (you can correct me) that is expecially the case for the AmigaOS devs. I know that Aros and MorphOS are very similar and highly compatible to AmigaOS 3.X whereas I know for several projects who had problems to support AmigaOS. Biggest problem for Aros is still MUi-support (Zune) if that is solved most applications work. I see that when I test applications on Aros Vision where I could add MUI38. AmigaOS seems intentionally go in a different direction and force developers to decide for or against AmigaOS. That works as long most devs are only supporting one platform and not really interested in crossplatform development, as soon this changes (f.e. a commercial market is again slowly developing) that will strike back and then there will be no chance to correct that without breaking all software. What do you think?

[OlafS3]

I think the difficulty that's being faced is that AmigaOS has to change the API, whereas MorphOS doesn't. AmigaOS's long term goal is SMP and memory protection. That's a heck of an undertaking, and where a load of work has gone already (that's not been noticed because it's invisible to the end user). As MorphOS has been concentrating on single-core hardware, I haven't seen it making the groundwork towards SMP - which would require changing the API (like AmigaOS has done). SMP will never work on AmigaOS unless the API-changing groundwork is done first.

If and when MorphOS starts work on SMP (have they done so already? I really don't know) they too will have to change the API somewhat, but I just wish it would be with changes that are compatible with AmigaOS's API changes. Not going to happen, though, I suspect....

You think the changes are SMP-related? I more thought they were done because of no interest what the others do. There are a number of cases where they reimplemented something but not compatible (neither to 3.X nor Aros/MorphOS).

Latest with 64bit nothing will run anymore so recompiling of everything would be necessary. The only camp where they are testing with SMP officially is Aros (Arix), if MorphOS or AmigaOS are heading in that direction yet is unknown. I read that the MorphOS devs would do 64bit and SMP in case of a ISA change and if I see it right (from outside) they have not yet decided where to go so they are propably concentrating on improving the existing base.

[OlafS3]

Besides as I understand it SMP is promised for decades (I think I read a announcement from 2003) but for 4.2 they only promised MESA/Gallium-support. 4.2 was paid by X1000 users so they will certainly concentrate on fullfilling the contract and features like SMP will have to wait. Another thing, will AmigaOS users accept a solution like Amibridge existing in Aros in AmigaOS? If not they have a serious problem with SMP.

BTW what do you think of my idea of a standardized Amiga class library?

[OlafS3]

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.

I did not write "idiots", I wrote "not interested". The difficulty of adding SMP is if applications automatically benefit of it or only if they are adapted to use it. SMP (how it is tested on Aros/Arix) is designed to automatically use several cores and that is much more complicated than a kind of PowerUp solution. That will not work without major changes on the system and that breaks 68k compatibility. For Aros no problem, MorphOS would make a break too but what will AmigaOS user say when that happens. 68k integration (in difference to using emulation) was a major reason to use PPC (and not another ISA).

[OlafS3]

I think similar to Thomas Richter... for me it is really surprising what people managed to realize with MorphOS or Aros (X86) or AmigaOS but I do not really see the sense of NG. For all amiga-related things I have 68k (using it on emulation) and for normal work I have Windows (7 and . I do not need something between. The only exception is a reimplementation of amiga (with its chipset) in a modern FPGA. It has some geek-factor and it is different to what I normal use. A PPC-based system that is 95% identical to a standard PC-board but either a old Mac or a expensive custom PPC board is not very interesting to me.

[OlafS3]

It's because some people just like NG. That's all there's to it. Nothing to understand, it's just the way it is. That's what hobbies are about. People do what they like doing, and they use what they like using. Why? Because they just do. There's no use in trying to make sense of it. The same can be asked about classic. Why do I like my A1200? Because it's cool. Why do I think it's cool? I don't know, I just do.

I did not say that my view (or the view of Thomas) is the only one. The same is that some here still hate X86, it is not rational at all. But it will be hard for "NG" to win new users because people outside compare it to the alternatives (that are better because of more money and more developers). I read somewhere that the people at Hyperion said better PPC than X86 because people would compare it with Windows when it runs on X86. That is both wrong and true, of course it is true that people would compare a X86 version of AmigaOS (or MorphOS) with other OSs, but it is also wrong because people always compare it with existing alternatives. Example for a OS that failed because of using X86 was BeOS, but I think BeOS did not fail because of X86 but because of not enough software. But I accept that there are people preferring a "obscure" OS running on "obscure" hardware because I do the same, just using another OS/hardware combination :-)

[OlafS3]

There are two good reasons.

If you are using real Amiga you must patch OS and install upgrades.
If you are using real Amiga you must patch HW and install upgrades.

With MorphOS you just buy some $20-$200 HW from ebay, install OS from USB or CDROM and if you like it you register it online. That is Amiga made easy.

Real Amiga can do same but personally I am not ready to invest my time and money to get it there. Not anymore.

I had to sacrifice some level of compatibility, I can only run RTG compliant software on it. But it was not great loss because my Amiga 1200 could run only RTG compliant software anyway (I didnt have TV available to Amiga).

Not long ago I was on a amiga-meeting. There were a lot of Amigas with lots of addons, from A500 up to A4000. One was showing MorphOS on Mac Mini. Really a nice system (from first sight) but I do not think that there were people dropping their Amigas in favor of MorphOS (or AmigaOS). They like to tinker around with their old machine, build in exotic accellerators or sound cards. The only thing that really might create interest (and that is from my point of view the vast majority of amiga users) could be a FPGA accellerator they can use to update their old hardware. Or perhaps a good standalone device. "NG" is perhaps the loudest and most visible group in web but it is not representing the majority of users. What do you think?

[OlafS3]

it is not a matter of like or dislike. I yesterday bought a notebook with 2 core 2.7 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB Harddisk, GPU, WIFI and so on  incl. Win 8 for 238 EUR (used). There is nothing that can compete right now with such offerings.

Then you get support at every corner, something that is very important. If you have obscure hardware you have a problem there. Used Macs may be a exception there.

[OlafS3]

Oh, but it is. If I like something, and I can afford it, I get it. If I don't like something, and I don't need it, then I don't get it. If people want NG and they can afford it, then they buy it. It's a hobby after all. No other justifications needed.

I answered to TeamBlackFox

I know that people for some reason want to use NG even if I personal am not very much interested. It is only a discussion where people exchange different views.

[OlafS3]

Thomas_Richter,

I don't know your background in the hardware industry, but I have several people in the companies I have worked for saying that the engineering divisions are putting their bets on ARM. There are ARM for mobile, ARM for the workstation and ARM for the servers. It isn't limited to mobile or embedded applications, and hasn't been for about 5 years. If engineering divisions of major companies like MS and Dell are saying to place your bets with ARM, then perhaps a major shift is coming in the next few years. With mobile devices being the norm, it may end up spreading back into the workstation and server markets, and the server market is already getting some promising designs. AMD is selling society compatible Opteron-A ARM kits for developers, Qualcomm and Nvidia are ramping up production with high performance ARM chips. Why not get ahead of the curve, and stay on top of the game?

x86 is very costs ineffective because it doesn't scale down well, Intel Atoms consume on average 20-30% more power while offering a diminishing return on power as clock speed scales up. I have a Nocona Xeon workstation at my side that besides being louder and running hotter than modern chips, does roughly as well due to having massive RAM ( My machine has 16GB ) and UW-SCSI, which is still very fast when using 15kRPM disks. The only applications it sucks are are those that are quad+ core aware, it has dual Xeons and for NetBSD usage does very well, but I simply don't use it because it is loud and hot when I have the option of using my TK1 based board from work, which is quiet and has better graphics performance.

"bet on something" is for private people making bets on horse races, on business you "do not bet" but make predictions and try to leave open chances to turn direction if prediction fails. We all know of the bets that were lost, from Commodore starting up to what we are discussing now. So if changing direction it would make more sense to have something portable like Aros so you can support both X86 and ARM and are on the safe side.

And if you talk about companies, there are a lot of companies that set on the wrong horse and do not exist anymore. Not a very wise strategy.

[OlafS3]

@Thomas Richter
My whole arguments rests on two simple facts.

1. Given the choice, the common consumer rather buys another cheap piece of hardware (adding additional value to his household. Like hooking it up to another TV, placing it in the child's room, etc) than screw with an existing computer. This is particularly true for sub-100 USD products

2. x86 as a platform has plenty of user friendly OS' people can rely on. ARM users don't have as much choice, in that regard.

But is that not making a bet again? In the mid 90s PPC was the bet, at that time it seemed a "safe bet". We all know history. Apple did not do the same mistake, they kept doors open, others in our community not, they bet everything on PPC and lost. Now people are again demanding to set everything on the "next safe bet". Why are you so sure that ARM will win? If you loose your bet AmigaOS or MorphOS go from one dead end in the next.

Yes X86 has other OSs but people will compare it anyway. Or you create something like the Raspberry that is unbeatable cheap. Other than that I am of a similar opinion like Thomas. What we need is new software and for that we do not necessarily a completely new platform but hardware with geek factor that is different from competition (like FPGA based hardware would be). Even if we have a 64bit OS with full SMP and MP this would not bring automatically new software because it would still have not the same user base and software as Linux, Mac or Windows. And for new markets like Smartphones or Tablets our desktops are not suited.

So if you are so sure you will certainly bet everything you own on that? Not? That is what most do. They talk as long as they do not risk their own money or do the work.

[OlafS3]

Uhh the entire industry of computing is based on speculation - you can carry out years of market research in advance of a product release, but you seriously can't anticipate the impact of said product, or its reception. In the case of Android, which PRIMARILY runs on ARM devices, with x86 and MIPS making up the minority, it has been well-received. An Android desktop would likely be ARM based, as the hardware is cheap enough that it will still be powerful, but competitive. Intel/AMD x86 at the same price range as ARM either is too power-hungry or too anemic to even boot up. That being said, I'd trust the engineers of MS, Dell and AMD, all of which I have worked with in my past job as a data center tech, over a handful of users and developers in the middle of a forum known for sociopathic trolls, hell I had lunch with a manager for the largest AMD data centre in the DC area simply because he was called out to the MS data centre I worked at and invited me and the rest of the crew to lunch at a sushi bar and discussed what he wanted to see done to improve AMD-based Dell server reliability with us, over sushi and beer at that. He also talked to me about the Opteron-A series, and he said that it will, in his own words "Be the smartest move that HQ has made since launching the Opteron line"

You know as well as I do there are logistical and also other concerns with having to support two different architectures, diametrically opposed at that! Without a ports type system like FreeBSD uses, one or the other will simply have little software. Best to focus on one architecture for logistical reasons.



If you're going to make a brash statement, prepare something better than just an opinion: http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-k1-processor.html

This, my friend is a SoC which has the power of an Nvidia GPU and a quad-core ARM CPU. I can't find any benchmarks vs an i5 or i7, but most people I know are on the budgetary end of computers, either older gen i-series, older-gen AMDs, or the Pentium and Celeron series of CPUs. Your personal desktop is certainly *NOT* representative of what everyone else has. ARM has scaled up at a logarithmic rate that is even better than x86, I can't really explain it to you other than it simply doesn't waste any space on the die for any legacy-cruft that an x86 CPU does. Your desktop, my workstation and most other x86 devices start up in a 16-bit mode, and have to be initialised from there to protected and then long mode just to even boot a modern, 64-bit OS. ARM? It originally deployed with a 32-bit design and a 26-bit address space, but it can still run a 32-bit binary inside the 26-bit address space. x86 doesn't have this luxury, its address mode is locked to its execution mode.

Furthermore, I will use the same argument that Howard Roark made in Fountainhead, original text below:



Similarly, what is real mode, AKA 16-bit mode, in a modern x86_64 CPU for? To start the BIOS, mostly - the original BIOS comes from the original IBM-PC designs, based on the 8088 and 8086. This was reimplemented by competitors to become PC-compatible. Then the 386 and 486 added a 32-bit protected mode, using an undocumented opcode in the original 8086 design to initialise it. They retained the 16-bit mode to keep DOS running, they simply used extenders like DOS4GW. With the extinction of Windows 9x with the atrocious Windows ME in late 1999, the 16-bit real mode was effectively rendered obsolete. But this was kept and copied into the 64-bit world, where now you had to escalate to long mode from protected mode from real mode. And this is all because the industry decided to use an architecture which is an extension of a 16-bit reimplementation of an 8-bit copy of a 4-bit processor. Why the hell keep all this cruft? DOS won't even run properly on a modern GPT sliced disk, let alone a system with no drivers!

ARM is significantly more towards my ideal of legacy-free than x86, and with the ARM64 releases, they're using a binary translation layer to execute the older 32-bit binaries in microcode on the 64-bit CPUs. In addition, Amiga would do better on a dedicated piece of hardware that is both cheap, and cost-effective, x86 isn't that answer. AmigaOS has a new place in the media-centric world - its low resource usage, efficient memory management and user-centric design would make it a perfect small computer OS, being used in either all-in-one computers or small set-top box computers, and ARM excels in those applications. None of the NG Amigas utilise anywhere near the full potential of workstation hardware, and as I hate to admit it, the days of a large howling workstation are numbered. As we speak I've my Nocona workstation for sale, simply because it is too loud and noisy to keep on, my Challenge S is quiet enough for low-end server applications, the Origin does well for high end, my Octane2 and Beaglebone have been doing very well as my main machines for most applications, and where I need a mobile solution, my trusty Nexus 7 does the job. I simply don't really need x86 except for a few things, which I am considering getting a small low-power computer to do the job of instead.

please keep certain phrases out of discussion

What I have a problem sometimes is that it seems all is either black or white. X86 is evil, your preferred hardware is good, Linux is evil, your preferred OS is good and so on. Always extreme. If you are in business you must be flexible, you do not unnecessary set everything on one bet, you always try to have plan B. As a big processor producer I might have to act this way (we see at Motorola what happens if the bet is lost), expecially as someone concentrating on software (including OS) you have the chance to leave another door open. Aros is showing that this possible with supporting different platforms at the same time. Of course you still need adapted components like UAE for the specific platform and you need everything to be recompiled when you change ISA. Apple was more wise than others in that sense, they are still there but a lot of other companies are not. Over the years I have so many trends seen coming and going that I could not count them anymore. The IT industries is always producing lots of new "bets" all the time, the intelligence is to survive despite of this. I do not know with whom you are having lunch and I could not care less but only because someone has a big salary and a nice title on his card it does not mean that he is right.

And as a application developer (what I do in normal life) I do not really care about hardware or lowlevel OS development. More important for me is how many potential customers are there, can I be sure that there will be development in coming years, how simple and productive development is and so on.

And BTW phoenixconsole is already working on supporting ARM as a new target for Aros (has f.e. just published a new version of his distribution for Raspberry). So if you are really interested you should support this.