[News] Amiga + Retro Computing 2002, first impressions | ANN.lu |
Posted on 07-Dec-2002 19:27 GMT by Diermar Eilert (Edited on 2002-12-08 02:55:19 GMT by Christophe Decanini) | 230 comments View flat View list |
It took place in a large congress room in Aachen's Eurogress. At 16:00, it was pretty crowded in terms of visitors ...
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Just a few words about the Amiga Retro event today, I've been there for an hour or so this afternoon:
It took place in a large congress room in Aachen's Eurogress. At 16:00, it was pretty crowded in terms of visitors, maybe 100-200 people, but pretty empty in terms of dealers. If you mentally subtract Thendic, who took up 50% of the space, the whole affair would have fitted into a grocery store. Well, I guess that reflects the state of the market.
I saw one Amiga One. Maybe there were more, I didn't look hard. The one I saw didn't do anything to get exited about (a pc-style box, obviously no AmigaOS 4, bulky mainboard).
The Thendic people were at the center of attention, having something exiting to show. I don't know how many Pegasos boxes they had with them, but there were lots of them for trial. Morphos looks great, their Ambient workbench is visually stunning. A large amount of money must have gone into the direction of designers, the icons are all ultra-professional, 3D, 24bit, raytraced. If you are ever going to write software for Morphos and plan to have equally good icons, you have your work laid out for you ;-) The overall design reminds me of NeXt. Nevertheless, everything is still quite basic in terms of operating systems: I didn't see a file manager or other things I would expect with an OS. For example, an equally well-designed "Start" bar would have been nice.
Unfortunately, their boxes only had PPC native software installed or I was too dumb to find regular 68K software. I've tried for twenty minutes to find a bug, cause a crash etc. but no luck: Morphos looks fine to me with that selection of software. I would have rather testet it with "normal" software though.
Some Pegaos boxes were open, you could see the April fix and the small mainboard. It's a micro-atx-sized board, you probably have to see it to realize how small it is. If mainboards were sold on optical merits, the Amiga One would be dead. I don't understand why Tendic choose a big aluminium case for it: yes, it looks nice but if you have such a small mainboard, why not advertise the possibilities of small dimensions ?
Conclusion: Pegasos/Morphos is much more advanced than I though before. If it's all pure PPC, the worst is clearly over for them. They seem to have a nice usable small OS. What's left for them to do is to provide more "middleware" to get rid of the basic feel. I mean the small tools that normally ship with an OS: file manager, calculators, whatever. Nothing complicated.
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Amiga + Retro Computing 2002, first impressions : Comment 169 of 230 | ANN.lu |
Posted by Iggy Drougge on 08-Dec-2002 21:28 GMT | Comparing MorphOS to Amithlon is unjust.
Amithlon, is as we all know, a cut-down Linux kernel running a hacked UAE version, it in turn running AmigaOS 3.x.
MorphOS is a microkernel (Quark) running a reimplementation of AmigaOS as a server.
Quark is not in itself an OS. A microkernel is the very bare essentials needed to implement a microkernel-based OS. In the formal microkernel design, the rest of the OS is implemented as so-called servers on top of the microkernel. The microkernel takes care of basic hardware interaction and inter-server communications.
However, the MK approach to OS design hasn't proved particularly effective performance-wise. Thus, most MK OSes tend to implement a thick, traditional OS design on top of the microkernel. They're not MK OSes in a formal sense, since the rest of the OS basically runs just as one single server on top of the microkernel. One example is various MkLinuxes. Mk as in microkernel, Mk as in Mach, a classic microkernel spawned off Berkeley Software Distribution developments. OS/2 is another Mach-based OS, and so is MacOSX.
MacOSX implements a big (very big) pack of BSD services on top of the microkernel. It also implements OSX-native services on top of of either the BSD environment or Mach (this differs from case to case).
While people like to point out that OSX is MK-based, and thus modern (Mac people don't really know what it means, but Apple says it's cool, so... ;-), it isn't an ideal MK OS. The bulk of MacOS is BSD, on top of Mach. So OSX isn't very micro at all, BSD being a classic monolithic kernel OS (and as a UNIX flavour not very suitable to a pure MK implementation even at its API level, will many attest).
Why this big explanation about MacOS X, you might ask. People use OSX, it's a shipping, major OS, gaining respect and admiration from old Mac convertites as well as UNIX and Windows users (though I don't respect or admire it personally).
As a side note, pre-OSX applications run in a sandbox implemented within OSX. Sandboxes is a concept we all know from MOS briefs.
Let's look at Amithlon for a while as well.
When you run Amithlon on your PC, LILO (the LInux LOader) loads a minimalistic Linux kernel (BTW, no matter how minimalistic it might be, Linux will never be a microkernel) with a minimalistic set of Linux services. This Linux kernel executes a custom version of UAE, the Useless/Universal/Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator. UAE usually emulates a 680x0 processor and the Amiga custom chips. More recent versions also interface to the host OS in various ways, such as mapping the native filesystem to Amiga drives, native networking to a bsdsocket.library wrapper, native graphics to a Picasso96 wrapper driver and in the last few versions even native SCSI to a scsi.library wrapper. All signs of an advanced emulation. Still, only wrappers. Similar things have been done for a long while in Shapeshifter and Fusion. These emulators access API calls in the host OS. The actual hardware is of no concern to the emulated environment, only the CPU is accessed more or less directly by the Mac emulators, for obvious reasons.
Amithlon takes this a step further. For performance reasons, all chipset emulation, save the absolute necessities, is thrown out. The Amithlon UAE implementation also allows specially-compiled code to execute on the actual processor. Workarounds have to be implemented to address the problem of different byte ordering (endians), but this is hardware-related (unlike modern processors, the m68k and x86 series have their byte ordering set in stone).
Even this mutilated, extended UAE running on its mutilated, custom Linux (I think the Amithlon author used similar wording to describe it) is rather sufficient just to run AmigaOS with modern RTG/RTA applications, though. There even exist Amithlon-ported apps running directly on the native X86 processor, including such a vital component (if you like sound output) as AHI, and for what I know, it might even have such vital OS components as colourwheel.gadget running natively.
Nevertheless, Amithlon is basically Linux plus UAE, running a more or less intact AmigaOS 3.x on top of Amithlon/UAE's very optimised 68k emulator. Though Amithlon has reimplemented Elbox's PCI library, hardware access is usually performed through drivers inside the Linux kernel. Wrapper drivers, in other words, not too unsimilar from the usual hosted UAE implementations. The Amiga-side drivers peep through a hole in the emulator out to hooks in the surrounding Linux environment, usually invisible to the AmigaOS. It's UAE equipped with hooks onto the native processor and the host OS.
And on to MorphOS.
Quark is a microkernel (remember?). Quark runs servers, or boxes. The only currently implemented box is the A-box, which implements services requires for AmigaOS. Inside the A-box, something indistinguishable from AmigaOS on most API levels runs. Mind you, this AmigaOS look-a-like is not emulated. Not in the UAE sense. If you do a "List SYS:", you'll see that no file sizes will correlate to any AmigaOS version. This is a reimplementation of AmigaOS, albeit running within the A-box. If we are to trust the intimately involved parties, no AmigaOS code is used, at least not now. And certainly no AmigaOS binaries, AFAIK. Much unlike Amithlon, which runs AmigaOS 3.x as installed from the distribution CD, and won't run much at all without it.
The MorphOS hardware compatibility list is very much different from the Amithlon one. Not just CPU-wise (Amithlon won't run on a Pegasos, and MorphOS won't run on a Taiwanese PC), and not due to different driver coding efforts, but since Amithlon drivers in many cases match the Linux compatibility lists when it comes to graphics and network cards (naturally not one-by-one, since the Amithlon Linux kernel contains a limited amount of drivers). Drivers in MorphOS as we know it now are AFAIK contained in the A-box. CyberGraphX drivers and our beloved DEVS: contents. As much as one might want to, there are no useful graphics and network drivers outside the A-box, much unlike Amithlon, very much unlike plain UAE. Naturally, MOS/A-box is a fresh, native reimplementation of what constitutes AmigaOS. Naturally, it contains a 68k emulator for compatibility purposes. But one should also not forget that a lot of PPC programs (and the Amiga has been marching toward PPC for five years now) run natively on the A-box. Not outside, since a microkernel usually won't run programs in the sense one usually intends. It's just a little dwarf kernel.
As for AmigaOS 4, it is an improved reimplementation of the traditional AmigaOS, running an improved reimplementation of the AmigaOS kernel, Exec, as its most basic component. Exec is neither a microkernel, nor a monolith kernel. Don't ask me what it is, but that's what an AROS developer told me. It's AmigaOS on PPC, nothing more, nothing less, basically implemented in the same way it's been on 68k.
Thus, we may reach a semi-informed conclusion.
Microkernels are not an unorthodox solution nowadays. Sandboxes have become mainstream as well. Pure microkernel OSes are still rather rare. A microkernel is very helpless on its own.
On a scale, UAE is an advanced emulator. Amithlon is an emulator on steroids, equipped with a host OS crutch so as to look like a real OS. MorphOS is a microkernel-based OS running a native reimplementation of AmigaOS as its main task. It's not an emulator. A-box is a compatibility layer, its contents an AmigaOS clone. The only emulator present is the 68k one, and that one will be implemented in OS4 as well.
OS4 is OTOH AmigaOS as we know it, on a basic technological level. All we can say about AmigaOS 3.x can be said about AmigaOS 4.x, with hopefully a lot of added bonuses.
Quark is only of our concern when more boxes are added. And MorphOS is neither an emulator, nor comparable to Amithlon, particularly not with its current (permanent?) state in mind. Amithlon stands out as rather uninspired in comparison to MorphOS, at all levels. Amithlon might, with a lot of effort, turn into something somewhat similar to MorphOS, but it most probably won't, and Linux and UAE is debatably not a good starting point for a MOS equivalent.
If this were the Mac world, MOS would be a kind of OSX, whereas AmigaOS 4 would be a kind of MacOS 10. =)
MOS is no emulator. |
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