I long for a decent OS.

[whabang]

MenuetOS has been around for ages, guys!
The compilers they had back then were probably a lot less effective than they are now. :-)

As for the topic, it's all about matching the OS with suitable HW. My main PC flies after I've spent a few hours optimizing Windows XP. Unless you really have to re-boot for some reason, then the hibernation function gets the system up and running in seconds.

I haven't used Syllable since it changed it's name from AtheOS, but it was a fun OS to play around with.

[koaftder]

Back in the day when instructions had a specific ammount of ticks and when registers refrenced in opcodes actually represented the reality of what was in the processor core and when you knew precisely how many ticks it took to fetch a byte from memory and the abscense of on die instruction caching you could make a serious argument about designing your algorithm around a processors instruction set.

Times have changed. That function that you just called might live in the cache at that moment of time, in case great, or it may have to be fetched from ram. No way to predict what the case will be. Instructions are broken down into micro ops now, and executed out of order and in parallel based on best case prediction hardware.

In many cases a nice hand rolled assembler routine will look really efficient but in reality stalls out the pipeline on every iteration, then you've got a shiney assembler chunk of garbage.

A lot of the optimisations they make in the processor cores are based on the output of the major compilers. In many cases not coding your asm like the compiler would results in wasted cycles.

[KThunder]

many assembly coders nowadays know all about caches etc and how to code specifically for them. knowing exactly how the actual pipelines work etc can result in speedups. there are several emulator coders and c/inline coders who do this extensively. see emulators.com for one.
if you know how a specific pipeline runs and how much cache you have etc you can code for that.
you can also order memory accesses and instuction streams around the architecture.  
people think they have billions of instuctions per second now so who cares about optimization you can write a program quickly and not worry about code size or speed. i mean we all have a gig of ram at least right?
thats how you end up with operating systems that take up gigabytes of space on a hard drive and take several minutes to fully load.
that is what this thread is about, someone wants a small efficient os that loads very quckly and does what he needs and thats it. not a gargantuan chunk of code that loads a hundred libraries and apps and protections and other crap that he doesnt need.
if you just want to send a simple email to a freind or something xp is way way overkill

[KThunder]

ok back on topic a sec,

do they still sell webtv boxes? those boot instantly and have some simple apps and stuff.

[koaftder]

Woudln't I have to profile for each processor series to take advantage of the pipeline stuffing tricks? Different profiling and code for each of Celeron, PIV, PentiumM,D and Core Duo? Along with each of the series in the AMD family?

[koaftder]

KThunder wrote:
ok back on topic a sec,

do they still sell webtv boxes? those boot instantly and have some simple apps and stuff.

It still exists. I saw one in BestBuy a few months ago.

http://www.msntv.com/pc/

[steve30]

Or are we destined to suffer slow, clunky, eye-candy filled, advert ridden, patronising systems which are constantly under threat of being taken over by every bit of software you download?

Yes

If modern word processors are too bloat why not use old software? Something like Microsoft Word 95?

Thats what I do. I'm quite happy with MS Office 2000 on Windows and ClarisWorks 4 on the Mac.

I am always moaning about the bloat in modern software, but sometimes I just think, sod those bad new programmes. Use what works. Even if it is 10 years old. (Oh, and Microsoft Word 2007 requires a 500MHz processor and 256MB RAM as a minimum).

[KThunder]

whats really amazing to me is that some people think that is totally acceptable. "of course you need a 1gz cpu and 512 megs of ranm to surf the net"

when is it going to be too much. when you need 50gigs of hd space for your os 3ghz cpu and 2gigs of ram just to send a simple email or write a letter.

i use win98 on a 900mhz athalon it flies compared to my fathers 3ghz pIV. i have a pIV mobo and winxp but i havent really seen the need to downgrade yet. i could use the extra horsepower for emulation but thats about it.

[Cymric]

KThunder wrote:
many assembly coders nowadays know all about caches etc and how to code specifically for them. knowing exactly how the actual pipelines work etc can result in speedups. there are several emulator coders and c/inline coders who do this extensively. see emulators.com for one.

Be serious (again). When coding an operating system you really don't want to be bothered with this stuff. This is bitfscking at its best. Operating systems are about ideas how to cope with conflicting issues like fast access to limited resources, stability, driver support, and scalability. Not about optimising the code to fit the pipeline architecture for a very specific CPU.

if you know how a specific pipeline runs and how much cache you have etc you can code for that. you can also order memory accesses and instuction streams around the architecture.

This is a boring and painstaking task best done by a optimising compiler. These are peephole optimisations, and humans will have a really hard time beating the compiler. The compiler can generate quite good to very good code for any CPU at the flick of a switch; humans will find that very hard.

You seem to be stuck in the state when slapping 'assembly' on a product made it 'better' and 'more optimised' and 'faster'. Compilers have evolved. Humans have not.

people think they have billions of instuctions per second now so who cares about optimization you can write a program quickly and not worry about code size or speed. i mean we all have a gig of ram at least right?

No, you've got that all wrong. It depends on your design specifications. If you want to code a tiny lightweight OS, there's nothing stopping you. Multiple such designs exist. But going assembly doesn't mean it's lightweight. It just means you have too much time on your hands to be able to code such a complex system. If the developers had gone C, the system would have at most taken two floppies instead of one, and now I'm being exceedingly harsh on the compiler.

thats how you end up with operating systems that take up gigabytes of space on a hard drive and take several minutes to fully load.

No, that's feature creep. Tons and tons and tons of extras a tiny handful of people expect out of the box from the computer. A googol of drivers is included for the most exotic types of hardware. A kazillion graphics, sounds, fonts, helpful documents, compatibility programs and what-not are included. And so forth, und so weiter.

The kernel files of any 'big' OS are really not big. I believe Windows 2000's kernel is about 700 KB or thereabouts. My Linux kernel is about 900 KB.

that is what this thread is about, someone wants a small efficient os that loads very quckly and does what he needs and thats it. not a gargantuan chunk of code that loads a hundred libraries and apps and protections and other crap that he doesnt need. if you just want to send a simple email to a freind or something xp is way way overkill

Aye. But my statement was that coding MenuetOS in assembly is a waste of time, as the exact same performance would have been obtained by going C. Take a look at SkyOS, for example. Same idea, but lightyears ahead of MenuetOS.

Back on topic of the original thread: perhaps SkyOS isn't such a bad idea for the OP. It is actively developed, very fast, has nice features, is perfectly usable, has a small footprint, and so forth. I might investigate it in the future.

[Dr_Righteous]

KThunder wrote:
whats really amazing to me is that some people think that is totally acceptable. "of course you need a 1gz cpu and 512 megs of ranm to surf the net"

My point exactly. Has anyone but me noticed we've had no net gain in speed since the inception of personal computers? Sure, we've gone from a couple of MHz in clock cycles to a couple of GHz... But I'm still watching my OS draw my data on the screen a little at a time. I'm still waiting for applications to load. I'm still waiting, and we've had a thousand fold increase in CPU speed! WTF?!

If it weren't for the fact Win98 crashes horribly on this machine, I would not be using Win2k. I'm trying desperately to avoid the "Windows eXPerience." And the most resource hogging OS of all time, Windows Vista, is soon to be unleashed upon the masses... Next time I build a machine, I'll have little choice but to use that, as it'll likely be a 64-bit dual core CPU I use.

Oh, and by the way... Why use Yahoo! messenger, and their JAVA based mail frontend, and the NWS JAVA radars? JAVA is about as platform independant as it gets!

You know, I think the folks over at VMWare have an opportunity to help everyone out. They could come up with a platform independant OS that acts as a emulation layer between whatever hardware it's running on and whatever OS you wish to use. No more "host operating system" like Windows or Linux... A direct hardware banging OS all its own. Sort of like "Amiga Anywhere" for operating systems.

[stefcep]

I run Win98se with the unofficial service pack on a celeron 550 that was left out on the street to be picked up by the local hard garbage collection. It had 64 meg ram 8m agp card, 16 bit sound 20 gig hard drive, keyboard, mouse and and the cmos battery was dead so it wouldn't boot.  2 dollars later and an extra 128 meg ram and this machine flies and is rock stable: i emulate using winuae and when running rtg software it is faster than my 060 A4000 (with the windows overhead !!!).  On the windows side I run older software eg ClarisWorks 4: boots in under 5 seconds; photoshop 5 LE, Firefox, Zonelabs 5 firewall, little mp3 encoding app i found on a cover disc.  Most PC's are slow because the current OS and apps are made to run on next gen HW specs esp memory to get you to upgrade.  Live with it, because thats the computing business model that will never change, because it is highly profitable.  I wonder how Win98se would run on a 3 ghz machine with 1 gig ram? The other problem is that people buy stuff with "features" they will never use or learn how to use without taking into account what they will do egI wrote my final year high school English essays using Prowrite on an A500 with 2.5 meg ram.  All I needed was a word processor that had scalable fonts, spell checker, format tools: why do students now need 3ghz machines to write an essay, the task is the same isn't it.

[whabang]

I wonder how Win98se would run on a 3 ghz machine with 1 gig ram?

Not very well, I'm afraid. Windows 98 starts using all availible RAM over a certain size as disk cache, so even if you have 2 GB of RAM in a machine you'd not be able to use all of it. :-)

However, you make a good point; most modern applications are filled with unneccesary eye-candy.

[KThunder]

cymric,
 
>You seem to be stuck in the state when slapping 'assembly' on a product made it 'better' and 'more optimised' and 'faster'. Compilers have evolved. Humans have not.

no we havent evolved but we designed the cpus and apps and code them. assembly coders arent stuck in the middle ages (80s) they now do code for this stuff. compillers are good but if they are perfect why do they all provide inline capabilities, you yourself admitted that all major oss are written in c and assembly.

weather or not this stuff is a waste of time is up to the people wasting (or not) their time, many assem coders do it cause it is fun.
we could argue this for pages and not get anywere i think assembly is usefull for many things and you dont. i actually havent done much coding in a few months and i am a offset lithographic pressman not a coder so im not argueing my livelyhood here.

[hardlink]

downward_s wrote:
On a laptop/battery that may see days between use?

It's a solution, but it's inelegant.

So get a Tandy model 100 or, even better, a Tandy WP2. Days to weeks on a set of AA's with use, months to years(!) off/standby. Even interfaces with Amigas using Term etc. See:

http://www.8bit-micro.com/wp2wp3.htm

Someone at an Amiga user group meeting gave me a M-100, and I liked it so much I tracked down a WP2, which has an 80 col display and is much thinner. I use it for just the type of thing you are tlaking about. Not only is it 'instant-on', it draws so little power you can connect to a small wall wort power supply and never turn it off manually. 8 bit processors may not be much use for Desktop Publishing, but they are more than sufficient for Text Editing.

[A1k_man]

my powerbook g3(Firewire) gets about 12-14 hours on two 7500mAh batteries, 6-7 on one 7500mAh. My old mac portable gets 6 hours/12 without HD on it's single 5Ah battery, it's too bad CBM never made an amiga laptop..

[Cymric]

KThunder wrote:
no we havent evolved but we designed the cpus and apps and code them. assembly coders arent stuck in the middle ages (80s) they now do code for this stuff. compillers are good but if they are perfect why do they all provide inline capabilities, you yourself admitted that all major oss are written in c and assembly.

I specifically addressed this: to have a clean way in which you can access system resources C has no abstraction for. MMU tables, setting up FPU control bits, sending data over various data buses, and so forth.

weather or not this stuff is a waste of time is up to the people wasting (or not) their time, many assem coders do it cause it is fun.

If it is for fun, then we are in agreement. If it is meant for a serious project with people intending to gain a lot of second-party support and the like, or when dealing with complex ideas (such as those underlying an operating system), then we are not in agreement.

we could argue this for pages and not get anywere i think assembly is usefull for many things and you dont. i actually havent done much coding in a few months and i am a offset lithographic pressman not a coder so im not argueing my livelyhood here.

You seem to have a knack for deliberately misunderstanding me, or misrepresenting what I write. Truly, I may not be able to write fluent Shakespearian english considering it's not my native language, but I have a hard time drawing the above conclusion ' don't think assembly is usefull [sic] for many things' from my contributions to this thread. Either way, I've made my points several times now, I'm not going to elaborate them any further. Enjoy your bashing the bare metal.