Native Aros programs also run?
AROS is AROS. Hosted and native run the same programs (as long as they're compiled for the right CPU, with the caveat that at the moment a lot of stuff is being reworked)
It is the Aros running on top of the Linux sub-system that intrigues me the most. Reminiscent of Amithlon, or X-Amiga in ways.
AROS-hosted is a "standard" part of AROS - you can run all the AROS distributions as AROS hosted with varying degrees of difficulty (you need to replace a few files). Quite a few of us use it as our main way of running AROS, since it's convenient especially for development.
The innovative part of AEROS is the increased integration to allow Linux applications to be started from the AROS side, combined with running AROS hosted in full screen mode under X without a Linux desktop environment underneath it.
Is it an Aros Gallium on one side talking straight to the Mesa on the Linux side?
AFAIK, the 3D acceleration for AROS hosted is based on a reasonably new driver called HostGL that forwards the requests to the Linux side. I don't think Gallium is involved on hosted, but I haven't really kept up with the structure of the 3D support.
What about the other basic hardware? (audio, usb, ethernet, blah blah). How do the Aros subsystems like network stack, usb, etc... interact with Linux?
If compiled the right way, the AROS code can access Linux API's when running on AROS hosted. The drivers make use of that to talk to Linux (and that's also how the execution of the Linux apps happens, I presume).
The network stack uses a tap driver that talks to the Linux tap interface, so effectively AROS and Linux see each other as separate hosts on a virtual networking interface.
Similarly for most other things there are drivers that essentially convert calls to the appropriate Linux API's instead of talking to hardware. AROS hosted mostly doesn't touch any actual hardware, as it effectively is a Linux application.
This means that for things like filesystems, AROS hosted normally use the Linux filesystem (and so you can access the same files from both the Linux and AROS side).
NOTE: I haven't specifically used AEROS - just regular AROS hosted.
