AmigaOS4 Feature Set: Release 1

[Elektro]

Why do you want to see os4 so desperately kronos? You have your morsos go crash it.

[odin]

Re: Arexx.

Just curious, Arexx hasn't been changed since the 1.3 A500 days has it? I mean....the Copyright message still says something like 1987 IIRC.

[Rogue]

Reaction is the GUI for OS 4. MUI is included for those programs that need it, and to faciliate easy porting - it wouldn't make sense to expect people to first move to a whole new user interface if we claim source code compatibility.

Wait until you see the new IBrowse ;-)

Finally, don't forget this is preliminary. There are some thing that didn't make it in this list...

[Rogue]

It would be nice if that would become real

Note that it says this is a possibility, not that it is/wil be implemented. It is just a means to show off how neat the memory subsystem is ;-)

[Rogue]

So it's just the same as the 8mb "chipmem" that I had on Amithlon
for the last year ? O.k. nice, but nothing big. And yes I would
could imagine that this could be usefull for that other OS too.

No, it could actually be made into a full-fledged AGA emulation, since you would be able to catch read/writes to the AGA area when set up correctly (i.e. the page fault handler would do the work). We don't intend to do this, though, but if someone is crazy^H^H^H^H^Hmotivated enough, he could try...

[System]

You guys forgot to mention one of  the most important improvements in my eyes:
Support for standards such as  DVD, MP3, fonts, grafic formats without 3rd-party patches and tools. Native USB and removable drives support. Have you seen that "VideoCD" thing? Even in M$ WindowsXP it's better to use 3rd party tools such as ASUS DVD2000 to watch VideoCDs and we have it built in.
I like the support for peripherals and drives very much.

GREAT WORK HYPERION!!!!!!!!!

Now it's time to release the product and Eyetech the AmigaOne.
I have already heard from Linux users, they are considering buying the AmigaOne, because they don't want to stick to Intel hardware anymore.

[chris]

I'm a little worried about what they did with DOS pattern matching. I thought it was just short of *nix regular expressions without being too *nix-y, which is what I fear they have turned it into. I suppose this isn't THAT bad, but the old pattern matching was so elegant.

I doubt much has been done to it - some scripts rely on the more advanced features, and ASL requesters are commonly called with ~(.info|.backdrop) as the default pattern filter.  If anything has been done, it would have been expanded, otherwise you risk compatibility.

Whoever mentioned ARexx: there were some small updates done for OS3.5/9 but I'm not entirely sure what they entailed.

Chris

[System]

Well, it sure is good to see that everyone is still alive!

Haven't heard from Amiga Inc., Hyperion, or anyone else in a coon age.

Very nice!

[Herewegoagain]

Wait until you see the new IBrowse

I hope that means it looks really  good.   :-)

Well, I've read over the feature list twice, and I must say that I was quite impressed with what I've read.  That said, I'm cautiously awaiting the release of OS4.  

If it is as good as the feature list sounds, then I will be back onboard 100%.  I was beginning to worry that this was all a big waste of time and that we would wind up with something like a "slight upgrade" to the OS, but the list here outlines much more than that, especially the extras like application.library, Altivec stream support and SMP that was not expected.  For the first time in a long time, I'm actually anxious to get my hands on a new OS.

Thanks Hyperion, and keep up the good work.

[downix]

Is The Exec NG fast compared to Windows and Linux

In a word:  No

In two words:  Not even close

In Three:  Doesn't even compare.

ExecNG had context switching times posted (context-switching being a key for any microkernel OS).  I took those (1ms for a simple switch, 4ns for round-trip) and compared.

LinuxPPC 2.4.18, unoptimized, had such times of 0.8 and 2.6.  Optimized, using a rtKernel, they got 0.6 and 1.8, respectively.  

Windows NT 4.0 PPC-version, had a time of 0.85 and 3.1ms, respectively.  

Now, I don't have MorphOS's times, but when I do I'll be glad to post them here for comparison.

[chris]

Extremely fast context switching times: 1 microsecond on a 600 MHz G3.

Extremely low latency for IPC: Signal "roundtrip" times below 4 microseconds

NB: microseconds.  4microseconds (sorry, I know the symbol but have no idea how to type it on this Windows thingy) is 0.004ms.  That's fast!

Let's re-run your comparison:

Linux      0.6         1.8
WinNT    0.85       3.1
ExecSG  0.001    0.004

btw the times for MacOS9 were quoted at the WOA-SE, these were good but still slower than OS4/ExecSG on similar spec hardware.

Chris  :-D

[downix]

In the Amiga writeup, it states clearly ms, being microseconds.  I thought initially they ment nanoseconds as well, and double checking on the other OS's, they were rating their context switching in ns, not ms.  So, Amiga either still doesn't measure up, or *really* doesn't measure up.

[HyperionMP]

I think you'd better try run those tests again, especially if you can't even distinguish between microseconds and milliseconds.

I get the distinct impression you don't really know what you are measuring and how to do it.

Anybody who has ever used NT knows that it is not exactly known for being responsive.

[Wilse]

@Ben:

Anybody who has ever used NT knows that it is not exactly known for being responsive.

I'm using it now and agree; it's not exactly zippy.

[Skyraker]

ExecSG 0.001 0.004

Incredible... well done lads....!

sKy

[Rogue]

What the hell are you talking about? Linux has context switching times of about 1 to 4 microseconds. ExecSG has stated 1 microsecond. Sounds rather like this is on par.

Just for the records:

ms = milliseconds
us = microseconds
ns = nanoseconds

We stated one microsecond. So again, what is your point?