@itix/@KimmoK

Why would memory protection be an issue? Suspend-to-RAM just keeps power to the RAM, CPU (with all or some state preserved), etc. while the system is in standby. Suspend-to-disk just provides a standardized way of storing and restoring whole-system state to and from nonvolatile memory.

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@KimmoK
Apple's Time Machine is absolutely brilliant. Amiga OS needs something like it, I can restore things painlessly and all it costs is a relatively cheap external drive. What AmigaOS should be doing is looking at modern features and making them better instead of fighting them. That's the Amiga OS I remember. Always out there in the lead. It's not the safe path, but it's the only one that will get AmigaOS some respect outside of retro circles.

@rigo Quote:

unless you think being able to pull the power at any time and expecting a safe system on a restart is a good idea...

Yes, I think that is a good idea, as long as files are not in the middle of being modified. Sure, a shutdown procedure might be NICE for some people, but it should not be REQUIRED.

REQUIRING a shutdown procedure is having the technology tell the users how they should behave - rather than users telling technology how it should behave. I prefer to be incontrol of my computer, not the computer to be in control of me. That's one reason I like AmigaOS

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@persia Quote:

Apple's Time Machine is absolutely brilliant. ... all it costs is a relatively cheap external drive.

No everything Apple makes is well made:
http://www.thewindowsclub.com/apples-time-capsule-graveyard
Quote:

Mac users are complaining that the Backup devices are failing after about 18 months

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@ChrisH
The *concept* of Time Machine is well done. I never used a time capsule, just a cheap portable drive I bought in Sydney.

@ChrisH

Quote:

REQUIRING a shutdown procedure is having the technology tell the users how they should behave - rather than users telling technology how it should behave. I prefer to be incontrol of my computer, not the computer to be in control of me. That's one reason I like AmigaOS

No, it is not. When a user turns a computer on, the technology is in control of bootstrapping. It does things that have to be done that the user does not care about. OK, you may be able to change the startup sequence but you can't change the lowest level. When you turn any device off, you are instructing it that you want it to be powered of and it does what it has to in order to achieve this means safely, whether it is a TV, or a washing machine. Most of these now have a soft power-off procedure. Expecting a device far more complex with multiple tasks running to be able to be powered straight down with no software checks of any kind is a very flawed concept. You may want to improve on the actual shut-down procedure and make sure it always works, ie. click and it goes off after 2-3 seconds, anything else is unreasonable and I cannot believe we're even having this conversation in the year 2009 - almost 2010...

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@Zardoz
What you are basically saying is that you think it is not possible for a modern OS to not require a shutdown procedure. I personally believe AmigaOS already proves that one is not essential (although it can have it's uses).

As further evidence that it is possible, I point you to cutting-edge OSes KeyKOS & it's successors (EROS & Coyotos). These OSes are Resiliently Persistent, which means that the entire state of the machine is periodically written to disk. If power is lost at ANY point, then it will simply boot-up at the last "checkpoint". Therefore you do not need any shutdown system to keep the OS in a consistent state. The only possible reason for having a shutdown system on these systems is to ensure that your current data has been checkpointed, but if the checkpointing system is fast enough then that is only a theoretical worry.

One can imagine that if AmigaOS runs on a Journaled filingsystem that guarantees data consistency (not just meta-data consistency), then all it needs to do is write any "important" system state to disk as it changes, and hey-presto, no shutdown needed! In fact we are already extremely close to this ideal.

As an alternative, you build a "transactional file API" to allow guaratees of data correctness, on top of an existing Journaled filingsystem (that only guarantees meta-data correctness). The OS is then rewritten to use this transactional API for any "important" system state. You then get performance AND safety, without a shutdown procedure.

In summary: A shutdown procedure is MOSTLY due to design decisions taken about the OS, although it can also help users who don't understand they need to wait a few seconds before they turn the power off.

Last edited by ChrisH on 03-Dec-2009 at 12:59 PM.

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@ChrisH

Quote:

In summary: A shutdown procedure is MOSTLY due to design decisions taken about the OS, although it can also help users who don't understand they need to wait a few seconds before they turn the power off.

This is getting quite silly. In all the cases you presented, if you disconnect power while it's writing to disk you'll have problems, even if the filesystem ends up being OK you will at least lose unsaved work. We are talking about operating systems that schedule stuff to happen at any point, if my machine is a file server (which all my machines are in fact) you cannot possibly know when someone else will write onto the hard drive. It's non-deterministic from the point of view of a single user. The user would not be waiting for writing to the hard drive to stop, he'd be waiting for *the probability* of a disk write to go down from 1 to 0.1 (arbitrary probability chosen). Why on earth would you not automate this process to at least have the system signal apps to save, wait for writing to finish then shut the power down? There is absolutely no logic to this whatsoever, you are saying that having the user do something inherently dangerous is better than having the system make the process safer for the user and his/her data.

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@ChrisH

Yes, there are other ways, and AmigaOS should be pursuing them instead of trying to patch this century's features on last century's OS. There were wrong decisions made because Amiga was out there where no OS had gone before. Persistence is an interesting concept and very much in the original Amiga line of thinking, unfortunately it's not retro so it will probably never be seen in AmigaOS...

This whole thread has had a "garden party" (RIP RIck Nelson) feel to it. Put AmigaOS out there in front again, add the innovative features that are current in todays thinking and drop the features that don't work in 2010 - or - sell the name to nuevos Overlords lesbianos españoles!

@KimmoK

Quote:

Let's try anyway. (IIRC, MOS has fast shutdown already, does it not?)

There is (on both MorphOS and AROS) but then it does significantly less than Windows shutdown.

@trev
Quote:

Why would memory protection be an issue? Suspend-to-RAM just keeps power to the RAM, CPU (with all or some state preserved), etc. while the system is in standby. Suspend-to-disk just provides a standardized way of storing and restoring whole-system state to and from nonvolatile memory.

The way how user land applications are made part of OS can become quite an issue. Applications can hold critical locks and semaphores, install interrupt handlers and what not.

Last edited by itix on 03-Dec-2009 at 03:16 PM.

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@Trev

>What you want then is a standard like ACPI, only for software; however, rather than have the operating system inform each application that the system is powering off, you want the applications to essentially move from one atomic static state to the next. When an application fails because power was removed from the system, you want the application to automatically return to its last known good state upon restoration of power.

I think it does not have to be atomic (if I understood it correctly).
(when I shutdown linux while I have open edited documents, I doubt it does it atomicly either, applications just save their data to some changes.tmp file or to mydocument.doc.tmp and record what files those were that was open, IMO, It could be done similarly on Amiga)
Already in Linux shutdown+bootup seems to be more usable for me than suspendtodisk or suspendtoRAM. I get the same result, but more reliably.

+ I would like to see the snapshot / quicksaveall as well (things continue running, all apps just quicksaved their data and (roughly) their state)

>Since the operating system is responsible for starting processes, it too will have to maintain some sort of atomic state in order to restore your applications. If the operating system already has to do it, why make the applications do it? The entire operation should be abstracted away and managed by the operating system, hence ACPI.
>Loss of power, either accidentally or intentionally, is a catastrophic event. If every system change--even moving the mouse from (50, 237) to (50, 238)--were atomic, i.e. it either succeeded 100% or not at all, it could work. I doubt, however, that every AmigaOS application developer has the necessary engineering kung fu to make that happen. So again, it begs to be handled by the operating system.


I think it would not require that much from applications.
If OS sends "quicksave" it would almost be same as user performing "save", except that the save should not overwrite the opened data file. It should be the mydocument.doc.tmp or something like that.. and that the application should do memo of what files were open at that moment.
etc..


>Why would memory protection be an issue?

My point for that mainly is that AmigaOS and application memory could be already corrupted and major crash is only one second away. It would not be nice to wake Amiga up just to see it crash.

Otherpoint is that if we had memory protection, isolated memory spaces and resource tracking, we would have a lot more possibilities.

But memory protection is huge task to do. Clevershutdown with quicksavewhatever would be very simple compared to that.

> Suspend-to-RAM just keeps power to the RAM, CPU (with all or some state preserved), etc. while the system is in standby. Suspend-to-disk just provides a standardized way of storing and restoring whole-system state to and from nonvolatile memory.

Of course, we could support those as well. But I want my clevershutdown + quicsavethingy.

btw. @ work everyone is setting their dell never to suspendtoRAM or suspendtodisk

Today:
I was in a meeting where there was 100 participants locally + 200 people over webex. Presentators dell did suspendtodisk without any warning, it took 10 minutes to continue the presentation. Not funny.

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@KimmoK

Quote:

I was in a meeting where there was 100 participants locally + 200 people over webex. Presentators dell did suspendtodisk without any warning, it took 10 minutes to continue the presentation. Not funny.

Without any warning = he accidentally hit the sleep button and he's set it to hibernate by default by any chance? I've superglued the sleep button on most of my keyboards for that reason.

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@Zardoz

I think there might be some BUG on the DELL.

Because we see it happen every now and then, without anyone touching the keyboard and with power cable attached to the wall.

(Still the DELL is the best and fastest mobileworkstation that we have ever had @ work. now after again cost reductions stepped in, we get only low end lenovos ... )

Last edited by KimmoK on 04-Dec-2009 at 07:07 AM.

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- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
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Quote:

I personally believe AmigaOS already proves that one is not essential (although it can have it's uses).

Just run an application that writes something to disk from time to time.

Run a paint program, starting working on something.

Now make sure your hd led is off (I surely wouldn't want to do that each time i want to shut my computer off... like if I had to care !), and shut it down, yeah, you were in a hurry, and forgot about your paint document still opened and unsaved...

The first thing that will happen is that you of course lose your document without any warning.

And the second thing is that the file the application was working on may be trashed/lost.

That proves it's essential. There's no need to have this discussion. Weather you like it or not. It is needed. Now there may be a better way to implement it... If you think so, just do it.

I would also add that Amiga is supposed to be simple/intuitive. And I'm sorry, but having to look at your HardDrive to be sure it's OFF before turning your computer OFF certainly isn't intuitive. You shouldn't have to think about anything before turning your computer off! ("did I save my work ? wait.. is the led lit ? wait.. is... hmm...)
That is of course without mentioning the fact that some cases doesn't even have an hd led (Mac computers, smartphones, ...)

Last edited by Leo on 04-Dec-2009 at 07:50 AM.
Last edited by Leo on 04-Dec-2009 at 07:49 AM.

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What, apart of a corrupted filesystem, would prevent the OS to boot properly after a "not save" shutdown? I'm talking about AmigaOS here. Is it writing to some kickstart module, or writing to the user- or startup-sequence? There might be some samba or TCPIP log maybe?

Although I can understand it might be handy to have someone to tell you: hey, you forgot to save that file, don't turn the system off now!" I'm thinking about our brains; to rest is to rust right? Aren't we capable of keeping track of what we do anymore?! Or are we just too overworked?

If the shutdown procedure has to be there, just to have the OS at level with other contemporary OSes, then be it. But please make it configurable. I personally don't want to shutdown the computer "while I'm in a hurry" and come back 2 days later and the computer is still on just to tell me the spreadsheet has changed (whilst I just had scrolled down the page or changed to another worksheet) or even better it waited for me to click on "power down" again because it had/has to install some updates.

I am all for evolution, I don't want AmigaOS to fossilize, and as I see it, this discussions might help to bring it forward but with collective thoughts about what is usefull, or what should be implemented but in a different way.

That quicksavestate thingy sounds interesting IMHO tho.

@Zardoz
Quote:

This is getting quite silly. In all the cases you presented, if you disconnect power while it's writing to disk you'll have problems,

One thing I like about AmigaOS is that it DOES NOT write to disk without your consent. My Windows Vista machine starts using the disk drive for every breath I take, it continuosly writes to disk for any stupid thing, even if you change the way to display a window.

You know when AmigaOS is writing to disk because the only time it does is when you tell it to.
Very difficult to switch off a computer after you just commanded the writing yourself a split second before (never happened to me even with my 2000 and never had a problem in 20 years go figure what kind of big trouble it poses...).

Last edited by DAX on 04-Dec-2009 at 11:45 AM.

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@DAX

Quote:

Once thing I like about AmigaOS is that it DOES NOT write to disk without your consent. My Windows Vista machine starts using the disk drive for every breath I take, it continuasly writes to disk foe any stupid thing, even if you change the way to display a window.

How does Vista perform with no swap?

Tried XP Pro without Swap on my (previous)Eee 900, it wasn't usable at all with 2Gb ram, while Debian did just fine. (Debian full install with KDE 3.5).

Last edited by tomazkid on 04-Dec-2009 at 11:47 AM.

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@DAX

Quote:

One thing I like about AmigaOS is that it DOES NOT write to disk without your consent.

What the hell are you talking about? How's that possible? Do you get request every time dos.library is called? "Hi, application X would like to get a file handler with 'w' access. Would you let it proceed?". How do you control background indexing and vacuming of YAM cache files?

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Quote:

One thing I like about AmigaOS is that it DOES NOT write to disk without your consent.

Of course it does...

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@Amigo1

Quote:

Although I can understand it might be handy to have someone to tell you: hey, you forgot to save that file, don't turn the system off now!" I'm thinking about our brains; to rest is to rust right? Aren't we capable of keeping track of what we do anymore?! Or are we just too overworked?

I can count the number of times that I've worked on a *single* thing on my computer in the past year in the fingers of one hand. I am always working on ten gazillion documents across many applications. It's not easy at all to keep track what is saved and what isn't.

Quote:

If the shutdown procedure has to be there, just to have the OS at level with other contemporary OSes, then be it. But please make it configurable. I personally don't want to shutdown the computer "while I'm in a hurry" and come back 2 days later and the computer is still on just to tell me the spreadsheet has changed (whilst I just had scrolled down the page or changed to another worksheet)

I would very much prefer the OS to stay on if I forget to save my work than for me to lose that work, thank you very much.

Quote:

or even better it waited for me to click on "power down" again because it had/has to install some updates.

That has nothing to do with shut down.

Last edited by Zardoz on 04-Dec-2009 at 12:44 PM.

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