With all the good news around Haiku and Amiga/MorphOS, you'd almost forget that other "old" alternative operating system, with most of its following residing in the United Kingdom: RISC OS. This operating system is fighting a predictable problem: a lack of hardware.
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Member since:
2005-07-13
Member since:
2009-02-19
There's definitely more issues than just hardware, but the OS being open sourced will also make it possible for someone outside of RISCOS Ltd. or Castle to help out.
The biggest issues with the OS itself are probably the poor memory protection of low memory, and the fact that the WIMP is cooperative multitasking.
There's been discussions on this (and attempts to improve the situation, too)...
http://www.drobe.co.uk/article.php?id=1327 (Drobe article by Peter Naulls about memory protection)
http://www.riscos.info/index.php/Preemptive_multitasking
Also, the NetSurf (one of the better browsers on the platform) team needs someone to maintain the RISC OS port: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.acorn.announce/browse_threa...
Edited 2009-10-29 23:23 UTC
Member since:
2006-03-13
... a classic "alternate" computing platform embracing cheap and easily available hardware like the Beagle Board. I wish people well in their quest and hope that this sets a good example for a certain other classic OS enviroment as to why open source (or at least semi-open source) can provide great benefits for platforms with small but loyal groups of fans.
Member since:
2006-07-16
Wouldn't it make more sense to port RiscOS to a "true" hardware platform than to a developer-only hardware platform?
Some Nokia phones and Internet tablets also use a TI OMAP processor. The new N900 (phone, about US $600) uses a TI OMAP3 3430. The old N810 (Internet Tablet, about US $150 or less used, US $200 new) uses a TI OMAP 2420.
I'm not saying RiscOS can make a rebirth as an embedded OS for mobile devices but it's an interesting niche to try.
Member since:2009-02-19
Well, a port to the BeagleBoard should be adaptable to most stuff using the OMAP3530 (or even other OMAP3 SoCs.) The Touch Book shouldn't be a very far leap from the Beagle at all, for example.
And, IIRC, when the port was started, this was the only widely available and cheap board with a Cortex-A8.
Member since:2006-01-01
Member since:
2005-07-06
Member since:
2007-04-23
Member since:2009-02-19
Well, those "OpenGL" drivers still need to run on something. You can't just target OpenGL, you need to target hardware, unless there's something running above your OS that translates OpenGL calls to hardware calls.
Now, Genesi (who makes the various Freescale i.MX515-based Efika MX products) does claim that they'll have a firmware layer that abstracts all hardware that they sell away from the OS, so the OS just needs to call their firmware layer with, for example, OpenGL calls, and it'll just work, no matter what the graphics chip inside is, even if the graphics drivers are closed source and NDA-laden.
Member since:2007-04-23
Of course. But there is actually a likelyhood that someone else will write OpenGL drivers to new hardware, but very little chance that someone outside the RISC OS developer community will write drivers specifically for RISC OS. So, basically, the idea would ease ports to platforms where OpenGL is alsready available. Furthermore, as the OpenGL drivers improve, RISC OS wil automatically take advantage of the improvements.
Member since:2009-02-19
OK, how do you plan to integrate these "OpenGL" drivers into RISC OS?
They're either going to be Windows CE drivers, or Linux drivers.
Either way, they're gonna take a lot of work to run on RISC OS.
Also, they're going to be binary blobs, because all of these mobile graphics cores are horribly NDA-laden. So, now, you're talking about either a partial CE kernel+GDI implementation, or a partial Linux kernel+what looks like X implementation, just to wrap some graphics drivers.
Member since:2007-04-23
Member since:
2006-09-30
Yesterday I was watching the Visiobus journal that runs on a RiscOS system: http://www.ctav.fr/presentation/index.asp?rub_code=36&thm_id=22&gpl... and I actually thought it could be interesting to port RiscOS to the gumstix board I have...
Member since:2009-02-19
Member since:2006-09-30