| [News] First impressions of the Amiga OS 4.0b | ANN.lu |
| Posted on 10-Feb-2004 06:48 GMT by Raffaele (Edited on 2004-02-10 14:22:00 GMT by Teemu I. Yliselä) | 86 comments
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Here you can find a brief report [from the Amiga North Thames meeting]. Unfortunately the report gives only a few informations. [Here's another report from the NCSCAUG meeting.] I forwarded these news from amiganews.
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| First impressions of the Amiga OS 4.0b : Comment 80 of 86 | ANN.lu |
| Posted by Chris H on 13-Feb-2004 11:18 GMT | Any chance of us getting back on topic? You know - what the original news
article was about? Guess not :) so you'll have to ignore my on-topic comments!
It's quite funny reading all the FUD on OS4 spread by MorphOS supporters, as if
MOS is actually fully finished & stable right now (although I admit it may well
be by the time OS4 is out).
There are actually only a few semi-major components to replace in OS4 now, and
none of these are actually required since they will just provide (big) speed-ups
not any new functionality. Specifically:
1. No UDMA drivers for IDE, just slow PIO mode.
2. P96 still being a 68k kludge.
3. No SNAP gfx drivers, just some pre-existing drivers.
4. The Petunia JIT still not properly integrated.
AFAICS from the OS4 Beta demo, pretty much everything else was there. And there
was some good news in the Club Amiga Mag the day after I saw the OS4 demo:
1. Apparently the UDMA code exists but is not properly tested yet.
3. SNAP now exists for LinuxPPC & GCC so porting it to OS4 is likely already underway.
Also, we already know Petunia exists, it is just integration into OS4 - not
rocket science.
So the only thing requiring lots of new coding (rather than just some porting or
other fiddling) is rewriting P96 for PPC. I don't know how big a challenge that
is, or how far they have got in rewriting it, but it seems to me this is what
will hold-up OS4 if anything will. Because of that I imagine they are putting
most of their resources into P96.
Given the pretty fast progress between the Alpha & Beta demos, I think it is
reasonable to guess OS4 can fairly comfortably be out by June (i.e. 3 months
more development time plus 1 month to manufacture & distribute it). Of course,
this is a guess, but it seems a reasonable guess based on recent progress.
My original worst-case guess was end of March, so thats not too much slippage.
And yes, OS4 Beta was running pretty damn fast, despite using 68K P96 & PIO IDE.
When it's properly finished, it's going to be BLAZINGLY fast :-)
Compatibility? Way better than the Alpha. They certainly still have some
problems, but fixing compatibility is pretty easy once you have a debugged
system with an architecture very similar to the old system. |
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