Not sure what the state of VP is these days, but creating a complete OS based on the idea is exciting.
- VP is not PowerPC, it's incompatible. It's a totally different kind of CPU.
Yes, and what you'd need to do is create a low-level hardware interface that is basically the VP run-time engine. The OS would run on top of this. This way, the OS and all the apps would be translated to native PPC, Intel/AMD, MIPS, etc, on the fly.
I'm pretty sure that AOS responsivenes&speed can not be fully reached if the CPU is not used natively.
So what. CPU's these days are ridiculously fast. Do we really need a 3.5Ghz chip to surf the web? With chips like that, even a 50% hit in performance would still provide a very satisfying user experience (and I think VP can achieve far better then 50%).
The use of that extreme virtualization would also make it impossible to take full advantage of HW acceleration (like 3D).
3D graphics is tied to the video card, not the CPU. The VP engine would have nothing to do with this. Alti-vec, however, might pose a problem, but there might be ways around this as well.
VP/intent does not support memory protection (MP is planned for AOS4.x) it never will.
Perhaps we need to write a specialized VP system for the OS. Or perhaps, add it to the hardware interface and spawn a new VP instance for each application and keep them all in their own sandbox.
Anyway, I think it's technically possible, might require more resources then Amiga has right now. It would be the ideal system and making an OS that is binary compatible with the majority of systems out there would be a great advantage for the Amiga.
- Mike
