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[Web] GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg DonnerANN.lu
Posted on 05-Feb-2003 10:30 GMT by NARR23 comments
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At GFX-BASE we have a new interview for you. This time we talked to Gregory Donner about his famous website, home of the OS.3.5/3.9 FAQs, the Amiga nostalgia page and more. We also talked about the new AmigaOS 4.0 of which Gregory is a betatester. A very interesting interview, that should not be missed. The GFX-BASE also hit the 200.000 page-view mark and will soon celebrate its 2-year-anniversary. Thanx to everyone supporting us!
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 1 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 05-Feb-2003 09:51 GMT
Yet another confirmation that "OS4 beta" is 68k only.
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 2 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Nomix on 05-Feb-2003 10:05 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (Anonymous):
"I have an Amiga 4000 power-towered system with a GVP 4060 '060 accelerator"
(...)
"As you might have guessed, I'm a part of the OS 4.0 betatesting team."

Betatesting a PPC OS on 68K hardware? Right...
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 3 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by koan on 05-Feb-2003 11:54 GMT
In reply to Comment 2 (Nomix):
> Betatesting a PPC OS on 68K hardware? Right...

I don't see any problem with this. If the new OS
is written in a portable language like C or C++
and you have the development tools you just cross compile
for a different platform.

If your established user base all have 68k then unless you
can afford to give your beta testers new hardware
you simply roll out a 68k version for testing.

koan
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 4 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Jools Smyth on 05-Feb-2003 12:19 GMT
In reply to Comment 3 (koan):
In that case, maybe they should release a 68k sale version including some of the components. I would definately be interested in an improved hdtoolbox, improved intuition, improved fast filesystem and so on.
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 5 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Elwood on 05-Feb-2003 12:38 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (Anonymous):
>Yet another confirmation that "OS4 beta" is 68k only.
Sure and it will be 68k on the A1 too, and my name is Jay Miner, and it's year 3027 ! :-)
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 6 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by MonkeyOS on 05-Feb-2003 13:30 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (Anonymous):
Sigh, yup.

As the snail craws:-X
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 7 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by pVC on 05-Feb-2003 13:38 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (Jools Smyth):
Yeah, why not OS4 68k then... I'd buy one :)
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 8 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Darren Eveland on 05-Feb-2003 13:51 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (Jools Smyth):
I see no technical reason why this couldn't be done. Might require a bit more work...but of course you would not get the ExecSG. It is clear many modules like the updated intuition, tcp/ip stack, and HDtoolbox already run on 68K and could be patched into the system or "loaded" with loadmodule in some fashion.

Of course this won't happen for many reasons. There are pros and cons which I am sure many people have already discussed until the cows came home.

The only thing that could perhaps push out a 68K version is customer demand.
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 9 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Linus G on 05-Feb-2003 23:21 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (Anonymous):
Did he say that he is beta testing the whole OS ? He might just be testing the new HD Toolbox.....
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 10 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by x on 06-Feb-2003 10:35 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (Jools Smyth):
Ok, so it looks that we are at least 3-4 people that would
buy a m68k OS4 :) That's a good start...

What about a petition? ;)
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 11 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by x on 06-Feb-2003 10:40 GMT
In reply to Comment 10 (x):
Then again, maybe we should wait for the OS4 PPC
version to materialize first :)..
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 12 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 06-Feb-2003 13:16 GMT
In reply to Comment 3 (koan):
> I don't see any problem with this. If the new OS is written in a portable language like C or C++ and you have the development tools you just cross compile for a different platform.

Don't be naive. You can't "just" cross-compile "any" C source code to run it on different hardware platforms, especially if the byte order is different. Some differences have to be taken into account when writing the code. I believe there is a paper for AROS that includes information for developers how to write C software to run regardless of byte order. It didn't look trivial to me (in the sense that catastropic mistakes can be made without ever noticing until the program is testet on the target hardware).
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 13 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Peter Gordon on 06-Feb-2003 13:32 GMT
In reply to Comment 12 (Anonymous):
For starters its fairly easy to write endian aware code, but both PowerPC and 68k are natively big endian, so that point at least is moot.
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 14 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 06-Feb-2003 14:54 GMT
In reply to Comment 13 (Peter Gordon):
> For starters its fairly easy to write endian aware code

That may very well be so but this is not the situatiuon we have: they (Ben & Co) are not writing an OS from scratch with PPC in mind. They are in the situation of having to deal with huge amounts of C code that has been witten without beeing aware of a non-68k-platform. Locating problems relating to differences between PPC and m68k in this mess can not be fairly easy.

> both PowerPC and 68k are natively big endian, so that point at least is moot.

I see. I'm not familiar with PowerPC. I'd suspect though that there are other diferences that would prevent you from "just" recompiling any C code (such as calling conventions for functions, how arguments appear on the stack ?).
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 15 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Darren Eveland on 06-Feb-2003 15:39 GMT
In reply to Comment 12 (Anonymous):
I'm not being naive. This code is ALREADY running on existing 68K systems.
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 16 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 06-Feb-2003 16:26 GMT
In reply to Comment 14 (Anonymous):
A fairly large bit of C code I wrote that shall go unnamed was written on an x86 Linux box, and has since been made available on Solaris, on various BSDs and on MacOS X without any changes.

But, we're talking about the Amiga, where programmers take illegal shortcuts to make their programs "efficient". Where a comment from the Frieden brothers about code not using register values directly resulted in screams of protest "I don't care what it says in the manual, we've always done it that way 'cos it's faster" and that sort of thing.
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 17 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 06-Feb-2003 17:05 GMT
In reply to Comment 15 (Darren Eveland):
> I'm not being naive. This code is ALREADY running on existing 68K systems

Excuse me, but what do you want to say here ? That's exactly the problem. It's (reportedly) running on 68K Amigas with PPC card, on computers belonging to a lot of different developers, distributed all over the world. You suggest that this mess can simply be recompiled for a PPC-only AmigaOne and voila, ten minutes later you have OS4. That's naive. Sanitizing all components, tests on the target platform, fixing obscure bugs that did not show up with an m68K still present will all take A LOT of time.
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 18 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Jon on 06-Feb-2003 20:08 GMT
They don't have the license to release a M68K version, neither x86 before someones comes and asks again. But probably the license allows some components to be released for M68K - I don't know.
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 19 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 06-Feb-2003 22:28 GMT
In reply to Comment 18 (Jon):
A lot of OS4, like its predecessors is made up of 3rd party software, either the kind of thing you'd download from Aminet or maybe buy for $15 from the author or whatever. In some cases the exact same software is being recompiled for PPC (different from having PPC acceleration added with Warp or whatever) and in other cases an updated and improved version has been licensed by Hyperion. Whether 68k versions of these parts will be available depends on the license (some people agreed never to make a 68k version) and on the whim of the author.

These are the easy bits. Most of the work is done by the 3rd parties and Hyperion just needs money (probably not much for Amiga software developers) to pay for it. Very few of these parts take away Hyperion's coders (notable exception: AHI is being ported by Hyperion)

The key features are the new PPC Exec kernel code and the 68k emulation. Those are useless on a 68k machine and can only be properly tested on the real hardware, hence the original topic of discussion. The Frieden brothers have on several occasions been "just a couple of weeks" from getting these parts working. If there are still people "testing" OS4 without PPC hardware it's most likely because those parts still don't work well enough to be worth testing.
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 20 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Gregg on 06-Feb-2003 23:37 GMT
In reply to Comment 16 (Anonymous):
You don't really think only Amiga programmers write "illegal" code, do you? People have been writing illegal code since they first discovered machine language, and I hope they will continue to do so. The world would be a poorer and duller place without.

Gregg

http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/writing/tools/unix/programming/jargon/jargon_48.html#SEC55
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 21 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Jon on 07-Feb-2003 10:06 GMT
In reply to Comment 19 (Anonymous):
Well, there are also a lot of internal work with Intuiton, DOS, Graphics (P96 v3?) and other libraries you left without a mention. Also MUI should be ported, although it already runs on a PPC system.
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 22 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Darren Eveland on 07-Feb-2003 16:11 GMT
In reply to Comment 17 (Anonymous):
Don't try to put words in my mouth. Go back and re-read my comment. I said, that since it has been already demonstrated that OS 4 components are already running on 68K systems (and yes even without PPC) that if there was customer demand that is the only way it could happen.

I did not get into the specific programming requirements to make that come true. I never stated that you could flick a switch and compile for 68K without any changes.
GFX-BASE: Interview with Greg Donner : Comment 23 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 07-Feb-2003 16:28 GMT
In reply to Comment 22 (Darren Eveland):
> Don't try to put words in my mouth. Go back and re-read my comment.

Darren, please take your own advice and re-read the comments. This thread originated in somebody's claim that a PPC OS can be developed (or more specifically betatested) on m68K hardware and you supported that argument with a comment along the lines "without any problem, it's C/C++". That's naive and I stand to that comment (for the reasons given). Somewhere between all those comments you seem to have lost direction and are now thinking about backporting from PPC to m68K ?!
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