@IridiumFX

Quote:

having a shared address space is not the same as sharing data in memory.

One does not exclude the other - but that IS exactly why PPC was the obvious choice, data structures left by the 68k can be used directly by the PPC and vice versa.

Quote:

The PPC on the classic Amiga is nothing more than a computation engine. It's used like a slightly more intelligent device than a DSP, but exactly the same way.

I don’t know what rock you have been living under, it has been possible to use the 68k merely as a bootstrapper for PPC-only OSes since more than 20 years - I have a LinuxPPC CD here somewhere from 1999, it supports APUS (Amiga PowerUP Systems), I have MorphOS 1.4.5 or thereabouts as well as OS 4.1 on my A3000/CSPPC - trust me, the 68060 is NOT in use when running a PPC OS and 68k support is provided through emulation - OS4 has Petunia and MorphOS has Trance - and they are INTEGRATED to a level that you can mix 68k and PPC binaries (PPC programs using 68k libraries and vice versa) as much as you care precisely because shared memory space and shared big endian data formats.

Last edited by kolla on 03-May-2021 at 11:45 PM.

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g01df1sh Quote:

hi that was just a guess as I cant come up with any other reason as to why HYperion has made very little progress on os4.1 in the last few years.

How about the obvious reason for Hyperion halting development?

amigakit Quote:

$34 for an Operating System in such a small market as ours is a poor commercial decision because it doesn’t generate enough revenue to pay for developers. This is partly the reason why core OS4.1 development has stagnated. If you recall 6 years ago the price of OS4.1 was 99 Euro.

Amigakit is likely correct that $34 U.S. (28 Euros) for AmigaOS 4 is not enough to fund development. Most likely, 99 Euros was *not* enough either. Judging from financial statements, Hyperion was likely losing money on AmigaOS 4. They needed to raise prices, increase volume of sales or cut costs until they returned to profitability. Raising prices decreases demand partially offsetting gains and the AmigaOS isn't good enough to support a premium price. Increasing sales volume is partially dependent on 3rd party hardware sales but Hyperion found a gold mine by expanding development to the larger 68k AmigaOS market. Developer costs for AmigaOS 4 were cut dramatically and 68k AmigaOS development costs were negligible. Hyperion did what they needed to survive although they may have been too desperate or greedy in not sharing some profits with the 68k developers to encourage sustainable upgrades and trying to register Amiga IP marks as their own for the AmigaOS 68k market.

When could Hyperion return to developing AmigaOS 4?

1. If sales of AmigaOS hardware like the AmigaOne 1222 picks up dramatically
2. If development costs of AmigaOS 68k and PPC can be partially shared
3. If development costs of AmigaOS and the Enhancer Software could be shared
4. If more developers could be convinced to work for free

The cost of an enhanced AmigaOS 4 was 99 Euros for the OS plus 57 Euros for the Enhancer Software which is 156 Euros ($188 U.S.). We can see already why we can't have cheap hardware. The original Amiga hardware was successful because it offered good value which the Amiga hardware today does not. The AmigaOS development budget at CBM was no doubt many times higher than the AmigaOS development budget post CBM, especially when adjusting for inflation. This was possible by spreading out development costs between hundreds of thousands of customers instead of hundreds of customers. We are stuck with a tiny niche market with expensive hardware and AmigaOS.

Most products in niche markets are good (specialized) at leading features desired in the market. The AmigaOS competes in the desktop market. I couldn't find a poll of top desktop features but it is not too difficult to come up with a top feature list.

1. Stability - AmigaOS lacks memory protection
2. Software availability and support - no
3. Hardware support - AmigaOS lacks SMP, 64 bit support, etc. but has some driver support
4. Security - no
5. Multi-user support - poor
6. Performance - good for the hardware used but not available on high performance hardware
7. Ease of use - good
8. Customization - good

The AmigaOS offers poor value in the desktop market. Even as a niche player it really isn't good at any of the most desired features. The following is a grid which includes desktop OSs and some niche OSs.

https://www.g2.com/categories/operating-system#grid

Here we see that the market is dominated by Windows and Unix like OSs which are mostly free. Most commercial OSs have been pushed out of the market as it is too expensive to keep up with technology, especially driver development. The AmigaOS is far behind practically every OS on the list feature wise yet is more expensive than most and only available on expensive low performance hardware. It is interesting that Raspbian made the list despite being on such cheap hardware.

Let's take a look at how the AmigaOS competes as an embedded OS. We will start by looking at top features desired which comes from the 2019 EE Times survey. Which factors most influenced your decision to use a commercial operating system?

1. Real-time capabilities
2. Good software tools
3. Ease of future maintenance
4. Technical support
5. Code size / memory usage
6. Processor or hardware compatibility
7. Support for my processor and drivers
8. Royalty free
9. Documentation
10. Network capabilities
11. Security
12. Overall cost
13. Suppliers reputation
14. Context switch time
15. Modularity
16. Scheduling efficiency
17. Customers desire
18. Multicore support
19. Safety certifications

The AmigaOS has real time capabilities (along with good context switch time and scheduling efficiency) and was on the 68k one of the best for code size and memory usage. It at least has potential as a niche embedded market player. Let's take a look at top embedded OS market leaders.

1. Embedded Linux
2. in house / custom
3. Free RTOS
4. Ubuntu
5. Android
6. Debian (Linux)
7. Microsoft (Windows 10)
8. Microsoft (Windows Embedded 7/standard)
9. Texas Instruments RTOS
10. Wind River (VxWorks)

Like on the desktop, the free Unix like OSs have taken market share while custom market OSs are losing market share. Most of these Unix like OSs have monolithic kernels which are not good for real time. Embedded Linux has multiple patches to reduce the amount of time executing code in the kernel (supervisor mode) which can't be interrupted for real time processing. The AmigaOS has a microkernel where very little time is spent in the kernel and supervisor mode. Embedded Linux was patched to allow a flat memory model with scatter loader for non-MMU using hardware which the AmigaOS had from the beginning. The AmigaOS may be a better embedded OS than many of the top Unix like embedded OSs. While Raspbian was not among the top 20 embedded OSs, the Raspberry Pi form factor was used in 16% of embedded hardware. The Raspberry Pi came out of nowhere to take impressive embedded and desktop market share. That's what cheap hardware does. Too bad the Amiga can't do that.

amigakit Quote:

You shouldn’t compare the price of a Raspberry Pi to OS4.1. They have little in common. OS4.1 is sold in fractions of the volume of the Pi. The economies of scale are completely different.

@ppcamiga1

Quote:

Vampire has nothing like this.

Actually they have, but it is not accessible for “normal kids”, only for the core. So if you have specific needs, you have to go through Gunnar to get it implemented.

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ppcamiga1 Quote:

On Amiga we have SysBase adress at location 4. Very fragile and very easy to override. Which almost always results in os hang. Enforcer protect first page of memory. On Amiga with Enforcer software with null pointer access do not hang os.

It would be better for the program with a zero page write to be halted and ask if the program should be allowed to continue executing. Programs often crash or hang after a bad pointer access.

I always wondered why the SysBase pointer was not put in a register when programs starts so location 4 doesn't need to be read.

ppcamiga1 Quote:

First page protection is also builtin in MOS and Amiga Os 4. Vampire has nothing like this.

The Vampire has a Memory Protection Unit (MPU). I don't know if a zero page protection program has been written but it should be possible. It certainly isn't a problem to protect the zero page in an FPGA.

AmigaOS 3 users can use ThoR's MMU library tools which protect the zero page. I believe this is done with the MMU but it may be possible without an MMU using the transparent translation registers. I have noticed increased stability from using this.

@kolla

I try to convice GvB to release it. Communication is very hard and its end in nothing.

@matthey

Quote:

It would be better for the program with a zero page write to be halted and ask if the program should be allowed to continue executing.

Thats how it works under Amiga Os 4.x.
On MOS or Amiga Os 3.x with MMU and Enforcer bad access is logged and program continue executing.

Quote:

I always wondered why the SysBase pointer was not put in a register when programs starts so location 4 doesn't need to be read.

They do this that way 35 years ago, it cannot be changed, so we need MMU.

Quote:

It certainly isn't a problem to protect the zero page in an FPGA.

It is not a problem, but after so many years it is still not done.
Vampire acts like 68000. It is really annoying.

@ppcamiga1

Quote:

I try to convice GvB to release it.

Release what? The AC68080 MMU? It is already released, it is in the AC68080, used by the Vampire cores... but not readily available from AmigaOS or the user, as that would most certainly break everything. As I wrote earlier, you have to go through Gunnar if you have particual specific needs that may be solved using the MMU.

Quote:

Communication is very hard and its end in nothing.

Maybe your needs weren't specific enough.

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@kolla

I need something that protect first memory page, log access to it, and write where it is in sources.
It is in Amiga Os with Enforcer for more than 30 year.
It is in Amiga Os 4 .
It is in MOS.
But not on Vampire.

@amigakit

Quote:

amigakit wrote: @matthey $34 for an Operating System in such a small market as ours is a poor commercial decision because it doesn’t generate enough revenue to pay for developers. This is partly the reason why core OS4.1 development has stagnated. If you recall 6 years ago the price of OS4.1 was 99 Euro. You shouldn’t compare the price of a Raspberry Pi to OS4.1. They have little in common. OS4.1 is sold in fractions of the volume of the Pi. The economies of scale are completely different.

Raspberry Pi also has UK government funding.

https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/national-centre-computing
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is one of the organisations that, jointly, have secured £78 million in UK government funding.

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Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

Hammer Quote:

Raspberry Pi also has UK government funding. https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/national-centre-computing The Raspberry Pi Foundation is one of the organisations that, jointly, have secured £78 million in UK government funding.

I knew the Raspberry Pi Foundation was goverment subsidized and received special pricing in some cases. I believe it is possible to come close to the performance/price ratio of Raspberry Pi hardware with mass production and no subsidies. Most big companies don't try because they enjoy high margins.

All of this gov money for RPi goes into the NCCE, which is entirely focused on educational purposes, training and upskilling Computer Science teachers (like me), providing resources for students and staff and conducting pedagogical research.

Very little (if any) goes into the hw/sw development for RPi itself, which had already proven itself extremely capable of success before the British Gov got involved. RPi was awarded the NCCE funds with a group of partners because of their previous success and existing educational activities.

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@ppcamiga1

my last "classic system" was A4000 with graphic card and 68EC030 (that is without MMU). Nobody at that time asked for it, at least not as a user. All OS that run on Vampire are amiga based, there is no memory protection anywhere. That makes them more easy to kill of course but as long you are not a developer needing MMU for debugging I wonder why you need MMU that urgently. Any change (patch, fix and so on) lowers compatibility so I wonder how adding components like enforcer affect that. There will be no (or at least not much) new software written (except games) and much of the old software is lost (expecially most of the commercial applications). We have to live with existing software base. Of course you could do a lot of changes to the system to modernize it but that would mean a lot of software no longer works. And then I would ask you why you use Vampire at all and not AOS4 or MorphOS or something from real world.

Last edited by OlafS25 on 07-May-2021 at 10:36 AM.

@OlafS25

It was 30 years ago. We all were younger, and have more time. It is past.
It is wrong to say use our hardware as it is or get lost.
Natami/Apollo/Vamprie team should just fixed this.
It is easy to do in FPGA.
Choose one location to manage zero page protection.
Write one value will made zero page read only.
After that any write to zero page will trigger irq.
Write other value will made zero page read write.
Easy, simple, just do it.

@ppcamiga1

ask it

I cannot judge if it has any side effects but it should be no problem

patch should be possible to integrate in apolloos

Last edited by OlafS25 on 07-May-2021 at 02:06 PM.

@thread

AAA bundle now shipping
german only atm.

#6

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@OlafS25

Quote:

at least not as a user.

Don’t users like to have software they can trust, that works?
developers are dependent on bug reports, and beta testers to find all bugs, they can’t find all the tiny mistakes, always. The only thing developers can do, is minimize the risk of bugs in code, by structuring the code well.

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@OlafS25

Poor you… that was a Cost Reduced A4000 primarily targeting “the embedded” market, SCALA customers etc.

http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/AmigaMail_Vol2_guide/node0161.html

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@yoodoo2

Quote:

yoodoo2 wrote: All of this gov money for RPi goes into the NCCE, which is entirely focused on educational purposes, training and upskilling Computer Science teachers (like me), providing resources for students and staff and conducting pedagogical research. Very little (if any) goes into the hw/sw development for RPi itself, which had already proven itself extremely capable of success before the British Gov got involved. RPi was awarded the NCCE funds with a group of partners because of their previous success and existing educational activities.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3435277/how-the-raspberry-pi-foundation-is-supporting-education-in-the-uk.html
Along with the British Computing Society and STEM Learning Council, the foundation has obtained the £84 million from the UK government.

The plan for the funding was to support educators in primary and secondary schools deliver education in computer science by providing hardware, training, certifications, and a myriad of resources.



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https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/29/google-giving-grant-worth-525000-to-fund-free-raspberry-pi-for-15000-u-k-schoolkids/
Google Giving Grant Worth $1M To Fund Free Raspberry Pi For 15,000 U.K. Schoolkids.

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Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)