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      /  Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
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OlafS25 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 10:06:07
#61 ]
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Joined: 12-May-2010
Posts: 6321
From: Unknown

@kamelito

you would propably need a kind of sandbox solution for old software. Theoretically you can do everything with enough resources.

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klx300r 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 12:20:53
#62 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 4-Mar-2008
Posts: 3833
From: Toronto, Canada

@mbrantley

Please let me know if you can get your X1000 to render again. I still love messing around with objects I made years ago…Drop me a PM either here or at amigans.net

Last edited by klx300r on 22-Oct-2021 at 12:23 PM.

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Birbo 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 13:23:45
#63 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 5-Apr-2007
Posts: 594
From: Zurich, Switzerland

@all

Can we stay on topic - or should I change the title of this thread?


My questions have not really been answered - apart from some assumptions people made...

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mbrantley 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 13:27:19
#64 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 10-Jun-2010
Posts: 559
From: Mobile, Alabama, United States

@Birbo

What do you expect? The people who really know aren't in the thread to answer and probably won't be. The rest of us just have our suppositions, but the ones given seem reasonable and likely.

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matthey 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 13:35:22
#65 ]
Super Member
Joined: 14-Mar-2007
Posts: 1968
From: Kansas

kamelito Quote:

They should do both AMP and SMP you could boot on AMP kernel for compatibility while SMP could be used so current programs could be recompiled to use this kernel and overcome incompatibilities.


Configurable would be good with a default of not touching the other cores. Treat the other cores as resources.

if (CORE1BASE = OpenResource(CORE1NAME))

Add a SMP CLI command which could be placed in the startup-sequence.

SMP cores 1-3 LB

The above command would configure cores 1-3 for SMP and enable load balancing. The code for the SMP command would OpenResource() cores 1-3. Any cores not allocated could be used as AMP cores by using OpenResouce() first. For best compatibility, simply comment out the SMP line.

kamelito Quote:

Binaries only programs could be patched on a priority basis (most wanted programs), like whdload hackers do it for games.


For PPC there are additional hurdles for SMP.

1. Hackers don't like PPC because PPC assembler is not human friendly
2. There is probably a wide variety of code which needs to replace the code under Forbid and Disable.

Custom hardware may be able to overcome some of the SMP hurdles for the 68k. Forbid and Disable macros may be best dealt with by binary patching to the functions where the source code is not available and this is a much simpler process than removing the Forbid or Disable.

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OlafS25 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 14:06:22
#66 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 12-May-2010
Posts: 6321
From: Unknown

@Birbo

I HAVE answered it... Enhancer in current form would not exist if it had been possible to buy AmigaOS at a reasonable price (simply because it makes no sense to double everything if you can avoid that). So either it was not possible to buy amigaos at all or requested prices was too high. We do not know and will propably never know it. End of discussion

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Birbo 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 14:19:53
#67 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 5-Apr-2007
Posts: 594
From: Zurich, Switzerland

@mbrantley

No problem with that. I can just change the title of the thread. I'm ok with that.

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Birbo 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 14:21:13
#68 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 5-Apr-2007
Posts: 594
From: Zurich, Switzerland

@OlafS25

You are right. You did give an answer.

So let's stop the discussion.

We can probably restart, once Hyperion says anything about that.

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Mobileconnect 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 14:24:07
#69 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 13-Jun-2003
Posts: 478
From: Unknown

@klx300r

A sensible future architecture for Amigas is IMHO not far off the rabbit hole system - run Linux on a second CPU, via an ARM chip on a plugin card say, or simply an rPi connected over ethernet / and let the Amiga be a desktop skin over a Linux core. The 'Amiga' part can run on your legacy 68k hardware or via emulation or a hybrid solution like pistorm. There's no rule that says a modern computer has to be one CPU, one set of memory, one operating system, indeed when you dig deeper you find this only appears to be the case but rarely is - many modern networking cards are entirely self contained computers probably running linux for example! The main obstacle to making this work is having a good xwindows server to run on the Amiga - there have been some over the years but they're out of date. But I can tell you I have had some limited success getting Firefox to run on an Amiga using an X server and an rPi. Having a window manager on the linux side with an Amiga look and feel wouldn't hurt either (there was one, years and years ago - AmiWM or something).

Heck, someone should make an FPGA Amiga chipset on a PCI card that can then plugin to an OS4 machine, or an rPi with some kind of PCI riser, and be used to provide hardware 'emulation' so the main PowerPC core doesn't need to emulate the custom chips. Remember, 20 years ago everyone would say 'AmigaOne is not a real Amiga because it can't support the legacy chipset'. Well now we can, in both hardware and software thanks to the reverse engineering efforts of many. Would be great IMHO if there was a FPGA with a 68K and Amiga chipset on a PCI card that plugged into an AmigaOne to make it into a 'real' Amiga. I have a V4SA but if it was on a PCI card I could plug into my Sam460ex, that'd feel like a 'complete' Amiga experience all in one. And throw in an ARM core too just for fun because why not. Again, this is not far off what the zz9000 people are doing but their vision isn't quite as ambitious (and rightly so given the cost and complexity).

@olsen

As a former engineer from the similarly constrained Symbian OS I would love to discuss with you ideas for making AmigaOS more robust without breaking it, like using a cleanup stack to introduce a form of MMU-less resource tracking. Or rearchitecting DOS, Intuition etc to use something like Symbian's R classes under the hood. I've emailed you in the past but sadly not had responses.

@ everyone else

I said it above and I'll say it again. SMP is a waste of time and energy for AmigaOS 4. At the very least, you can avoid most of the issues making SMP difficulty if you (a) assume only code written for OS4 can exploit it, (b) assume that there's so little OS4 software out there, that anyone making it is still active and will happily recompile it with SMP safe constraints and (c) that 68K programs are only ever run on the primary core. If 2nd or other cores exist, they can be used to run critical sections of standalone code that doesn't itself multithread or access external resources directly or code directly under the control of the kernel and part of the OS itself. Heck, why not implement a version of WarpOS that runs WarpOS code segments on the second core?

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number6 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 14:30:34
#70 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 25-Mar-2005
Posts: 11540
From: In the village

@OlafS25

Perhaps he did not care for the answers, because we offered several.

@Birbo
Quote:
Since a lot of development for OS4 is done by A-EON: why is OS4 not completely in the hands of A-EON?

Because it is under total control of Ben Hermans, who is now not only "permanent representative", but also "director" (yes again)

Quote:
And if the reason is a certain amount of money: How much is needed to transfer OS4 from Hyperion to A-EON?

As stated before (listen to Olsen/Olaf Barthel please), this is not solely about money, therefore talking about money is pointless.

Quote:
It starts to become a mess. Right?

Hence the lawsuits and associated legal endeavors. The goal is to have "clarity". Period.

Quote:
That is the plan of A-EON - or do I understand something wrong?

Everyone is doing what they can to survive. Plans will change once we start to see some court rulings.

Quote:
Then we will have like 2 OS4 developement in parallel?

Same answer as above. Period.

Quote:
When will the lawsuit be finally settled then? This can't take forever... or can it take forever?

Partial answer already in post #44 this thread. But yes, it can take forever. As long as delay tactics continue to be employed the unruled upon motions will continue to pile up.

I think I responded to everything for which you included a "question mark". Let me know if I missed anything.

Edit: added

Quote:
We can probably restart, once Hyperion says anything about that.

Ben posted on this very site that he can not say a word about anything without consulting his attorneys.
The same is true for Mike. Don't hold your breath.
I'm trying to answer your questions since neither they, nor any of the developers in fear of violating their NDAs can/will speak.
The only ones speaking are the CEO and CFO of Intellivision concerning the trademark objection there. They are the polar opposite of Amiga owners.

#6

Last edited by number6 on 22-Oct-2021 at 02:56 PM.

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amigang 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 15:43:23
#71 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 12-Jan-2005
Posts: 2018
From: Cheshire, England

@Mobileconnect

Quote:
Heck, someone should make an FPGA Amiga chipset on a PCI card that can then plugin to an OS4 machine, or an rPi with some kind of PCI riser, and be used to provide hardware 'emulation' so the main PowerPC core doesn't need to emulate the custom chips.


I kind think it was hoped that more fun project would come from XMOS, which is part of X1000 & X5000, from the old X1000 press release...

"'Xena', a nod to the old custom chip names. It's the inheritor of the 'transputer' concept, and it's something we're quite excited about.

'Xorro', a new slot using an industry-standard PCIe x8 form factor to give access to the 'Xena' IO. This will be the route to Xena's 64 IO lines, which are dynamically configurable as input, output, or bidirectional. 'Xorro' will allow bridging Xena to external hardware for control purposes, to internal systems, or to other Xcore processors. This last point is worth more exploration; XCore is a parallel processing architecture, and if you want more power, you can simply chain more XCores together. Reference boards have been made with up to 256 cores, offering a theoretical 102400 MIPS. Those of you interested in high-end imaging or scientific applications, for example, take note. Capable of eight concurrent real-time threads with shared memory space, at up to 400 MIPS (about 6 68060s worth), Xena gives the X1000 a very flexible, very expandable co-processor. The uses are endless; control hardware, DSP functions, robotics, display - even SID chip and console emulators. The Amiga has seen some truly ingenious hacks and add-ons; Xena can take this to a whole new level. It will take a while for the full possibilities to be realised, but we urge you to visit XMOS and discover more for yourselves"

So we kind of already got a co-processor and apart from a De-bugger tool I dont think i seen anything else come of it, which is a shame. Its pretty clear it would of been much nicer to had a FPGA chip on the board.

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Hypex 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 15:49:44
#72 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@kolla

Quote:
Is Shell-Seg 47.47 supposed to work with previous OS releases


I don't think so! Isn't Shell-Seg an obsolete component from the 1.3 Enhancer package? That has't been needed since OS2.0? It should AFAIK.

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Mobileconnect 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 16:09:56
#73 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 13-Jun-2003
Posts: 478
From: Unknown

@amigang

Vanity projects layered on top of vanity projects don't work.

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Hypex 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 16:58:40
#74 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@matthey

Quote:
SMP could work well enough on the Amiga with a future API depricating Forbid and Disable. The only question is if SMP is possible with Forbid and Disable and how much of a kludge it would be for older program compatibility. If SMP is possible with Forbid and Disable compatibility, it will be tricky to implement especially with the PPC weak memory ordering consistency model which allows reads and writes of cores to be arbitrarily reordered without memory barriers, atomics or some other multi-core locking mechanism (for example, a library could be flushed by one core before the library count is bumped by another). The cost of a Forbid or Disable is likely to be very high without custom hardware.


I think it would have been better to handle this when porting OS4 began. But it looks too late now. I have to ask why Forbid and Permit is even needed and to a lesser extent Disable and Enable? Generally the reason is that a process wants to manipulate a system list. Uh oh. This may have been acceptable in the good old 68K days but why does any process need to even touch a system list? And more so why is it even allowed to touch them? This reveals a major security flaw in AmigaOS they should have fixed years ago.

They did change some things in the publically readable Exec lists so 68K and PPC wasn't able to fully traverse the system. But they didn't go far enough. The reality is that a simple Forbid lock is too vague. It's doing A in order for B to be performed. In this case A is halting the system while B is some lesser specific operation. It's just a bad design. What should have happened is providing access functions for legitimate cases to view or modify lists. For example port handling, process lists and other cases where memory needed to be protected. The system should have been the one to handle this. This would have broken old sources as doing so would have been more strict. But Interfaces already broke old sources. You gotta break an egg to make an omelette.

Take SignalSemaphores, for example. Now, they wish to depreciate them in favour of a Mutex. And early on in the OS they abandoned original Semaphores in a major case of breaking backwards compatibility. Because they need a Forbid to lock a SignalSemaphore. Well whose fault is that? A SignalSemaphore is a perfectly fine system way for an atomic locking. I like them. The fact is it's not my fault if the system is internally doing a Forbid. That's out of my hands. I don't think they even need to do it. PPC provides lwarx and stwrx for the purpose of doing an atomic lock on longs as well as related ones for bytes and words. These can easily do a locking count so used in AmigaOS with multiple cores. As long as they aren't the cut down embedded ones with no cross core mechanics in place.

I think from here on the use cases in the system for Forbid and co need to be examined. Replace them internally with proper atomics. And tighten up the nuts so only the system can touch the system. As a simple example, a PutMsg, really only needs to hold up senders and lock out the receiver until the message is in the que and it's internal so can be controlled. But there are lots of cases the system doesn't need halting. I bet the majority are specific use cases where a specific locking mechanism would be way better.

Last edited by Hypex on 22-Oct-2021 at 05:11 PM.

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Hypex 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 17:03:36
#75 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@mbrantley

Quote:
I might have to alter my ModePro screen promotion settings if there is not another problem, but it is late and so I will save that for another day.


Do you still need to use this? I haven't used it since I started using the built in Screens promoter. It's not always easy to use but what does ModePro do that Screens can't after all these years?

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NutsAboutAmiga 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 17:33:21
#76 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 9-Jun-2004
Posts: 12795
From: Norway

@Hypex

Quote:
Do you still need to use this? I haven't used it since I started using the built in Screens promoter. It's not always easy to use but what does ModePro do that Screens can't after all these years?


Some programs might crash already when it opens on the wrong screen, it easier if you can catch it the act.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 22-Oct-2021 at 05:34 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 22-Oct-2021 at 05:33 PM.

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Mobileconnect 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 17:51:23
#77 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 13-Jun-2003
Posts: 478
From: Unknown

@Hypex

Here's a better solution: when a 68K program calls Forbid() don't actually stop multitasking, simply put the process into a 'danger' mode where whatever else this process does before it calls Permit() is handled with kid gloves. For example, make a copy of the system lists somewhere in new ram allocation, and use MMU (we're in PPC space remember) to map this processes copy of the system lists to the copy you just made. Then let this process do whatever it needs to, and any system calls it makes can check for 'danger' mode and behave differently as required. heck, just make a clone of the system state at the time Forbid is called and dump this process into a sandbox on the basis that it's about to do something stupid so don't let it.

If any OS4 PPC binary calls Forbid(), just make that show an error dialog and exit, and force the developer to go back to their source code and do it properly.

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number6 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 18:00:34
#78 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 25-Mar-2005
Posts: 11540
From: In the village

@Hypex

public screens != custom screens

Modepro will inform you of the name of the screen it is looking for.
You simply create it and define it as you wish. Done.

#6

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TRIPOS 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 18:22:54
#79 ]
Super Member
Joined: 4-Apr-2014
Posts: 1204
From: Unknown

@mbrantley

Quote:

mbrantley wrote:
@Birbo

What do you expect? The people who really know aren't in the thread to answer and probably won't be. The rest of us just have our suppositions, but the ones given seem reasonable and likely.


I think AmigaKit has given a perfectly crystal clear answer to the question in post #16 in this thread. AmigaKit is part of the “AeonKit”-sphere (AmigaKit, Trevor Dickinson, A-eon, Matthew Leman, and other related entities), and together with what they have said earlier (as reported by amiga-news.de linked to by me above) their plans are very transparent. No need for speculations, just read what they say and connect the dots.

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TRIPOS 
Re: Why is OS4 not in the hands of A-EON?
Posted on 22-Oct-2021 18:49:11
#80 ]
Super Member
Joined: 4-Apr-2014
Posts: 1204
From: Unknown

@Mobileconnect

Quote:

Mobileconnect wrote:
@matthey

SMP is a dead end from an Amiga point of view.


But there are signs that AeonKit is working towards SMP in ExecSG, which is part of their “System 54” effort. As Bigfoot writes in that tread, his new MorphOS kernel has been both SMP and 64-bit for quite some time. But that doesn’t mean that the MorphOS (Amiga) userspace has it. This will require a break with old legacy, much like AROS on x86. But if your “Amiga NG point of view” is OK with this path, then it’s quite easy and straightforward to go ahead. Personally, I’d be more than fine with sacrificing old legacy compatibility (could be emulated instead) in order to achieve a true NG path forward.

BTW, it’s “OS4” that is a dead end from an Amiga point of view. Maybe AeonKit can recreate on their own what AROS and MorphOS did two decades ago? Maybe not…

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