What Could AROS Become?

[nikos]

Ok, good to know it is more easy to port. Never been a version for AROS but JIT must be enabled.
If anyone is up to the task we could try to collect the money wanted to the port it.

[o1i]

Just some summary:

Porting of Janus-UAE v1.4 to 64 bit makes *no* sense. It is based on *very* old sources, which have never been compiled for 64bit anywhere at all. The v1.4 JIT is 32bit only, you would have to rewrite it from scratch for 64bit.

WinUAE *is* quite portable. In fact fs-uae is a straight port of WinUAE just with another GUI (more or less).

Janus-UAE v2 is a port of WinUAE including the GUI and working on 64bit.

There is no "shortcut" like just port v1.4 to 64bit.

[aha]

@o1i

I still hope that you can complete Janus-UAE v2 for 64Bit as a port from the WinUAE sources. Now Paolone is working on Icaros64 too and Janus would be an important part for this distribution imho. For the test of Janus-UAE v2 I had unfortunately no time the last couple of months because of my real life...

[x-vision]

There been different goal and opinions about how AROS could be run.
Some tougt that AROS could be like Linux, supporting all kind of hardware.
That would be fantastic but would require a much bigger team of developers than
we ever had.
There was a dream that AROS could be a NG Amiga platform with all kind of software
running like on Windows or Linux but that is by far never going to happen. I'm not going
to explain why but there are to many limitations in the OS.

If that comes to be true, I'm in kind of shock now. I know Aros is limited because the lack of resources, and missing modern features like multi user and memory protection (although I think there is some basic implementation), but I thought those would be addressable in the future, and that the basics and structure of the OS would be good enough to survive and improve for many years, because that was one of the goals: A modern re-implementation of Amiga OS.

If that's not true, I would be very dissapointed. What would be the point for Aros then?

[miker1264]

There been different goal and opinions about how AROS could be run.
Some tougt that AROS could be like Linux, supporting all kind of hardware.
That would be fantastic but would require a much bigger team of developers than
we ever had.
There was a dream that AROS could be a NG Amiga platform with all kind of software
running like on Windows or Linux but that is by far never going to happen. I'm not going
to explain why but there are to many limitations in the OS.

If that comes to be true, I'm in kind of shock now. I know Aros is limited because the lack of resources, and missing modern features like multi user and memory protection (although I think there is some basic implementation), but I thought those would be addressable in the future, and that the basics and structure of the OS would be good enough to survive and improve for many years, because that was one of the goals: A modern re-implementation of Amiga OS.

If that's not true, I would be very dissapointed. What would be the point for Aros then?

It is my hope too that AROS contnues to advance and grow to become more modernized such as going to 64bit and support for multiple processors as well as drivers for usb 3.0/3.1 and improved graphics. But in order for all that to happen AROS must attract more developers.

Having an AROS IDE and a layout designer for quickly making user interfaces for MUI/Zune is important as well as more cohesive programming documentation. Making it easier to program may attract more programmers. Just my thought on the matter.

[salvatore]

Exactly Miker

[o1i]

There are not so many limitations in the OS design. It most likely will never get any secure runtime multiuser abilities and memory protection will never reach a level considered to be safe enough compared to other systems. It will always have one address space for all applications, but this limitation should be no problem anymore with 64bit pointers, as the 16 Exabytes address range should give you enough space to enlarge stacks for example. Currently not even started, but possible.

So there are possibilities to reach a certain level and if some hero steps up (which happens from time to time) speed can increase. Currently progress is slow, so the gap to modern systems doesn't get much smaller.

But for a developer this might be the challenge, push the limits further and further. That's what the Amiga always was, back then maybe with demos etc. Now there is an additional challenge for OS developers ;-)

[dizzy]

There been different goal and opinions about how AROS could be run.
Some tougt that AROS could be like Linux, supporting all kind of hardware.
That would be fantastic but would require a much bigger team of developers than
we ever had.
There was a dream that AROS could be a NG Amiga platform with all kind of software
running like on Windows or Linux but that is by far never going to happen. I'm not going
to explain why but there are to many limitations in the OS.

If that comes to be true, I'm in kind of shock now. I know Aros is limited because the lack of resources, and missing modern features like multi user and memory protection (although I think there is some basic implementation), but I thought those would be addressable in the future, and that the basics and structure of the OS would be good enough to survive and improve for many years, because that was one of the goals: A modern re-implementation of Amiga OS.

If that's not true, I would be very dissapointed. What would be the point for Aros then?

It is my hope too that AROS contnues to advance and grow to become more modernized such as going to 64bit and support for multiple processors as well as drivers for usb 3.0/3.1 and improved graphics. But in order for all that to happen AROS must attract more developers.

Having an AROS IDE and a layout designer for quickly making user interfaces for MUI/Zune is important as well as more cohesive programming documentation. Making it easier to program may attract more programmers. Just my thought on the matter.

The USB3.0 is almost there, it still needs a hubss.class (now merely a clone of hub.class) and memory allocator for the pcixhci.device (and transfer codes for it and a USB3.0 mechanism for the hubss.class to know the device/port state) USB3.0 provides better mechanism to do isochronous transfers so we should get that too at the same time the USB3.0 code shows some signs of live. Now the hubss.class binds with the USB3.0 driver, or at least it used to.

There are a lot of Forbid/Permit pairs to protect the Poseidon stack so it may hinder the performance a bit, a thorough cleanup of the USB code is also needed.

Transfer codes for a USB driver is nothing special, but we need some USB3.0 love for the driver(s). There are some bypasses in the Poseidon code, one for instance that the driver needs to tell to the stack what USB version it is used for, it's abit redundant as everything should be looked up from the roothub and its structures... It's all there.

[salvatore]

@o1i

but in my opinion there are many things in winuae that are not needed at the moment, all that part related to the emulation of various devices that are needed?

[paolone]

Janus UAE 1.4 is very old and it can't even run recent builds of AROS M68K. I am sticking to a very old 68K system base on 32bit AmiBridge because of this, and there aren't chances I will bug Oliver anymore to help me on this matter. I'd rather prefer him spending his own free time on Janus V2 instead: we must look at the future, not at the past. From time to time, Oliver is also helping me with porting/compiling software on both 32 and 64bit architectures and I shall be already happy with this.

[salvatore]

i understand, i use janus on abiv0 for one software for editing audio "samplemanager" and is essentially to have become janus for x86_64 i think really, attend next noticed for icaros good work

hi