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[News] OS4 status updateANN.lu
Posted on 07-Nov-2003 18:04 GMT by Lewis Mistreated65 comments
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Thomas Frieden today posted some fresh news about OS4 wip on Amigaworld. There's something we're working on that we hope to show in France this weekend (so I'm not going to tell ya...won't spoil the surprise ). Other news: We're still working on the graphics system. The originally anticipated 2-3 weeks where of course 2-3 weeks of full-time work, but as always, something else comes your way and you have to rest some work and give priority to other... Things are slowly falling into place now. A lot of people are currently working on AmigaOne drivers (that's one of the biggest projects, anyway). And of course, everybody is still working on bits & pieces. Browsing through the recent upload notification mails on our beta list, I see some new PPC-native datatypes, several bugfixes to existing components (most of them are PPC now), some new PPC modules (not a lot... did I mention that most of them are PPC now, anyway ? I think I have only 4 68k modules remaining on my work installation, one of them graphics.library). One of the new "kernel" related features is a new ramlib (that's the component that is used to bring libraries into memory from disk): You might know that this is a prime candidate for crashing to do flakey library initialisation code. The new ramlib is now multi-threaded, meaning that the opening of libraries will be done in sub-processes. If one of those crashes, it's just removed by the mother process, improving system stablitiy a lot. Additionally, the latest exec includes a new memory tracking facility: You can now find out for each memory location if it's been allocated at all, and who allocated it. Very useful if you're debugging a program, or want to throw away all memory allocated by a given task. Sorry for the lack of news. There wasn't any big milestone reached, and with the frequent shows that's happening since some time, the overall progress isn't as visible anymore. On every show, you'll see more recent versions, more bits added, but nothing "spectacular". If you'll watch any footage from France, you'll probably notice that there where some speed improvemnts in the graphics sector even though the graphics.library they'll be showing is still the same as always.
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