SMP Update?

[trekiej]

Hello, is there anything new in the AROS SMP area?
Looking to for some direction for 2019.

[wawa]

so far, no.

[trekiej]

I think I would be happy to have a Raspberry Pi 3b+ with smp and all drivers.

[PurpleMelbourne]

Vampire will be out with SMP at some point. But they don't know if there will be an OS to use it.

I hope SMP AROS is out within a few months.

[ntromans]

I think I would be happy to have a Raspberry Pi 3b+ with smp and all drivers.

That would be a brilliant little machine - fingers crossed this actually comes to pass in the new year.

Cheers,
Nigel.

[trekiej]

@thread
Me too, come on 2019.

[PurpleMelbourne]

Could SMP 68K from AROS be patched in to proper Workbench / Kickstart?
That way Apollo could release an SMP Vampire, which they can do now but wont because Workbench / AROS do not support it.

[Samurai_Crow]

@PurpleMelbourne
The current Kickstart replacement ROM images are large.  It requires an extended ROM in addition to the basic Kickstart image.

Workbench is the AmigaOS trademark so ours is called Workbook.  It also needs work.  Wanderer is such a large Workbench replacement that it doesn't fit into the ROM which is why Workbook was written.

[PurpleMelbourne]

Can it all fit into a 4MB ROM?

Can you mix and match AROS files into the Official Kickstart and Workbench files?

I suppose the thing I'm most interested is getting past the existing hard limits imposed. So if we can have multi processing, weather it be SMP or asymmetrical MP, there are bonuses in different ways for each system. But no bonus while we are stuck with only one CPU which is not quite fast enough.

[wawa]

aros smp is is not compatible with m68k, it is ifdeffed since some structures had to be extended as such, if it was enabled for m68k it would reneder existing software unusable. we already had a subtle incompatibility because of missing (forgotten) padding when smp was first introduced. it didnt affect all of the m68k binaries, so it was not really easy to find.

what concerns aros kickstart form m68k it is currently 1mb and its not really clear to me if it can be reduced. we (toni) are currently working on it trying to enable debugging it with winuae. other than that it already works (or should work) on most amiga hardware. unfortunatelly it doesnt boot through with the vampire. i am testing it on a lent machine right now.

[PurpleMelbourne]

Are you worried about the size of Kickstart going beyond 1MB? With the right EPROM (23C4096??) you can have a bigger Kickstart of 2 or maybe 4MB split over two chips in A1200, A3000 and A4000. I'm not sure about the other ones. Maybe with a bigger eeprom you can also give them a bigger kickstart.

What is the chance of NON-SMP asymetrical multi processing? LIke using extra 68k cores as co-processors or something? It would be great if you could have a Vampire with a separate core for ShapeShifter for example. So even if most (all?) Amiga software is not multi-threaded to span multiple cores, at least there would be tricks to push different tasks to different cores?

And future software such as Firefox on Amiga could be multithreaded enough to be able to run if one CPU is not fast enough.

[hth313]

Once the RPi port can be used, it would be good to see AROS make better use of that hardware, the latest model is quad core. While I like my A3000 and want to run AROS on it, I think the RPi and other small ARM based boards can be a more interesting future. Not that I would object if anyone would make proper 68k based CPUs and machines again, not at all.

[PurpleMelbourne]

The irony of wanting to UPGRADE to a Raspberry Pi level CPU!
The ARM SPC's do look pretty good. I've been paying attention to the Rockchip RK3399 based versions.

With Apollo bringing out out the new 68080 on FPGA, there is a chance for enhanced hardware to host OS enhancements. If AROS simultaneously begins establishing itself as a significant choice on the Raspberry Pi as the enhancements upon expanded Commodore Amiga's coalesce then the foundation that is known as Amiga can be moving forward nicely.

Raspberry Pi AROS could be an important bridging platform for the Amiga as the Operating System moves onto ARM cores. Fingers crossed for the future :-)

[nikos]

From what I understood the Vampire is a FPGA board where one CPU must do everything. No custom shipsets like Amiga had.
In that scence the Pi is more Amiga like. So much is done with the GPU these days. Video, 3D, 2D.
SMP is very difficult without breaking everything. It is still possibly a good idea to fork AROS and have a version people can play with on top of the classic version. It is what Mschulz is doing. I'm quite sure he got it right. I'm more unsure about where a forked AROS version is going. Just look at Haiku and how many years that OS been in development without any success. Where does a new OS fit inn and how long are people going to wait for it to be usable.
AROS just recently, with the right hardware became a stable, good OS.
Personaly and at least for now I like the x86 series. Still with single core that CPU is very powerfull. write or port some drivers for some powerfull GPU and we would have a system that would fly. I'm even happy with my Latitude D520. With 2 GHz Core2Duo CPU and at least good 2D accelleration I enjoy it. 3D chip is quite weak but still good to play some of the older 3D games like Quake III in lower resolutions. 
There are no arm CPU today that could touch even a Core2Duo CPU running single core, maybe in the future. The GPU in Pi is way more powerfull than the IntelGMA GPU in my laptop. Let's see if there ever will be a native drivers for Pi GPU running AROS. Problem might be with next Pi new GPU would need new drivers.   
Look at Amiga, MorphOS and AROS. How many drivers do we got for different hardware. Not may. It is no easy task. The introduction of Nouveau, MESA solved lot's of that, at least for GPUs but not been updated in long time. It's been so long time that there are no Laptop made last 10 - 12 years that would work with it.

[aha]

we (toni) are currently working on it trying to enable debugging it with winuae. other than that it already works (or should work) on most amiga hardware. unfortunatelly it doesnt boot through with the vampire. i am testing it on a lent machine right now.

I saw your (Tonis) commits on the AROS-mirror from ezrec today. Thank you both very much! Keep up the good work!