Nicholas Blachford has written an interesting article about MorphOS. It covers the history of MorphOS, its structure and the inner workings of this new and interesting OS.
MorphOS in Detail
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Is there some assembly code in the code that makes the OS ?
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http://islande.hirlimann.net
The author is mentioning that x86 architecture allows only for quite slow context switching. Not so good for his kernel. Would it really matter all that much? I’m sure that it’s not great, but I wonder what you really loose in the end.
Right after the discussion about how Q will be a microkernel they say this:
In the future the drivers shall be moved into the Quark kernel where they will be independent of the A-Box and indeed of any other boxes, this has the advantage of making them usable by all the boxes.
Well, which is it? True microkernel or quasi-mk like NT or BeOS, which they disparage for moving device code into kernel space?
What is the Pegasus computer? I’m unclear if it is a logicboard or a full blown computer you can buy.
it is a full ppc atx mobo which is also meant to run amigaOS4 (comparable to the AmigaOne)
http://www.bplan-gmbh.de
http://www.thendic-france.com/TECH/US/products/pegasos/pegasos.htm
<quote>it is a full ppc atx mobo which is also meant to run amigaOS4 (comparable to the AmigaOne)
</quote>
The pegasos, is not running AOS4 as we speak. It wasnt made to run OS4 either. It also looks like, it wont run OS4 anytime soon.
That is, Hyperion CEO later this week confirmed that he had not gotten any formal invitation from Thendic or bplan about a board they were offereing. Only what had been said in forums.
Thanks lynx!!
A friend of mine just got his Pegasos MB w/MorphOS betatester system a few days ago and I can’t wait to go check it out..
I saw the pictures of Morphos at BeGeistert. Not to shabby I must say. I stumbled upon MOS, later on. I had a spare 233 x86 box lying around. It said to use dos, so I got Caldera Dr-DOS 7.03b, In installed dos, installed the pascal components required, installed MOS, ran Did, and stared at what appears to be AmigaOS on x86. I had to do a double take, because many have said that it’s not possible. Well, I thought so to, but I suppose I was wrong perhaps. I’m still working in it, and development is continuing(they just jumped from shareware to OSS) on it. But- for how young it is, it’s very decent. At this time, I can get 1024x768x256, which isn’t bad, and probably something I could do to make that better, as there is greyed out sections for higher color and resoloutions. The code binary is a bit messy if you go with 3.07, because of changeover from shareware to oss and from TP to FP, but it’s fast, decent enough, and fairly stable. It’s a boon for pascal, and It does run fast(even fpus), so, I guess it’s all in how you do it, not what you do. Anyhow, the link is http://jp.planas.free.fr/main.htm and you should test it out if you have a spare box lying around. It’s astonishingly fast, for dos, and it’s for real.(yeah, especially if you configured your sound blaster correctly and play a modfile). The coolest part is, opendos will continue, and dos w/ networking, pascal, and MOS all fit easily on a 100mb hard drive. The test system boot drive is 100M in size, it has 66 megs free. So, I wouldn’t be so fast to say amiga OS won’t work on x86’s, because I think this might be proof that it can, in a manner of speaking. 🙂
@obelix
sorry to say this but you are completely mistaken here. you are mixing some stuff here that are in no way related together.
MorphOS != MOS (the link you provided)
you can read more about MorphOS on http://www.morphos.de
Note that I am not an expert on MorphOS.
@ Ludovic
The vast majority of MorphOS is likely written in C. Some assembler code may be used for implementing the kernel/HAL. I know that some small parts of ExecSG for AmigaOS4 is hand optimised to ensure optimum performance for the underlying hardware.
@ Nico
It is likely to be an issue, but reallife experience tells me this difference isn’t likely to be of a factor 10 magnitude, with regard to context switch times. I only have to look at MacOS X (Mach microkernel) for the PPC, which has extremely bad context switch times or QNX (Neutrino microkernel) for x86 which handles this better.
Also Amithlon which is an AmigaOS emulator on top of a linux kernel is very repsonse while running AmigaOS (exec microkernel) emulated!
@ lynx
Originally bPlan wanted to create an official AmigaOne motherboard, but they currently AFAIK have no intensions of actually signing the license agreement. So don’t expect AmigaOS4 to be ported to the Pegasos anytime soon. A vast majority of potential Pegasos consumers have showed their interest in an official AmigaOS4 licensed version however, so hopefully Thendic or bPlan will sign this license, so that Hyperion can start doing the port for this board.
If you want to run AmigaOS4 it may be better to get an AmigaOne instead, which are being sold with 800 Mhz G4 CPUs in addition to cheaper G3 solutions. Unlike the Pegasos which is a MicroATX form factor board, the AmigaOne is an ordinary ATX form factor board and offers one additional 66 Mhz PCI slot in comparison (4 PCI, AGP, AMR). Another noteable difference is that the Pegasos board offers a seperate CPU board, which could be replaced with dual processor solutions in the future.
Document Update:
There’ve been a few small changes to the doc, firstly I’ve removed the term “Amiga Compatibility” as we don’t claim that. We are compatible with Amiga applications.
Secondly there is some confusion over drivers in the kernel, I don’t think they will actually go into the kernel itself as I mentioned.
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What is the Pegasus computer? I’m unclear if it is a logicboard or a full blown computer you can buy.
Talk to the reseller, they can probably sell it as either.
http://www.pegasosppc.com
For more MorphOS details try:
http://www.morphos-news.de
No, I never said they were the same. Big difference. I just thought those who are interested in this sort of angle as a recent addin would like to see some info on it.
I am not mistaken. If you could read what I said, you will take it I well understand the difference. They asked questions about what was morphos. Pegasos is the board, morphos is the OS, obviously.
Obviously, I mentioned what I did in this thread, because of the nature of what MOS is. looks like workbench, smells like workbench- but in pascal. I have heard routines they are working on an assembly kernel for MOS with a twist, dual dos/internal kernel.
What it basically means that if you want Amiga on your system, you aren’t so limited anymore. Most OS’s are written in C, C++ and ASM. It’s not often pascal gets mentioned in the same paragraph as “OS”.
Anyhow, I don’t have any ppc machines, and a lot of people don’t.
@obelix
This proves once again that you don’t know what you are talking about. We here in the #morphos developer channel asking questions about what’s going on in this thread because you talk a lot of unrelated things. Your MorphOS stuff is in no way related to the MorphOS that gets sold with Pegasos PPC Motherboards. Please go to http://www.morphos.de for some proper information. Right now you are talking out of context and confuse people with your misinformations.
This:
“MOS ( Master Operating System ) is a professional Graphical User Interface (GUI) for pascal programmers.
It’s like a VISUAL PASCAL for DOS.
It’s a RAD ( Rapid Application Development ) tool for Pascal programmers : a complete toolkit.”
Isn’t the same as this:
“MorphOS is a new Operating System for PowerPC RISC microprocessors which runs on the Pegasos computer and PowerUP (CyberstormPPC, BlizzardPPC) expansion cards for the Amiga.”
They happen to have the same logo: A blue butterfly (a
Morphos menelaus…or something like that), but thay are
totally unrelated, obelix.
Wow, thats scarry
I wonder where the MOS crew got their Ideas for a name and logo then?
@ Mr. McDonnell
“Wow, thats scarry
I wonder where the MOS crew got their Ideas for a name and logo then?
”
First of all, bPlan’s OS is called “MorphOS”, not “MOS” (as some people write it). If you abbreviate AtheOS, you get “AOS” which is also an abbrevation for “AmigaOS”… Is that a good reason to think the author of AtheOS is unimaginative and simply ripped off the AmigaOS name? I don’t think so.
As for the MorphOS logo, it shows a butterfly named “morpho menelaus”. Due to the fact that “morpho” is part of the name “MorphOS” (and that the butterfly looks good, too), it was only natural to use it as a logo. I somehow fail to see what the name “Master Operating System” has to do with butterflies, but then again perhaps the author was just looking for a good-looking symbol and accidently found the perfect match, a blue butterfly. Who can blame him for having good taste?
@ Mr. Siegel
Oh dear, yes im aware of all that. What i wrote was light hearted humour. I wasnt actualy suggesting the MOS crew got their name and logo from these guys. Chances are they didnt
.
I doubt the point made about clean room reimplementation. A guy who has contributed to MorphOS has told me having disassembled pretty much any binaries including kickstart roms. Not that I care about how it is done. I certainly approve disassembling (and even encourage it) and reverse engineering.
is it possible to *remove* the amiga boing ball off the mos
related stuff ? mos is an amiga api emulator (or pascal gui?)
its bad enough to see the company abusing the amiga names
in google with sponsored links with ads for their product.
I doubt the point made about clean room reimplementation. A guy who has contributed to MorphOS has told me having disassembled pretty much any binaries including kickstart roms. Not that I care about how it is done. I certainly approve disassembling (and even encourage it) and reverse engineering.
I used the room clean room very deliberately.
Disassembly is illegal so the developers can’t and don’t do that.
Besides, it would be completely pointless, what use would 68K assembly be to a PPC programmer using C? Code is unreadable at the best of times so it’d be a lot quicker to read the API references and implement the API that way – so thats exactly what they did do.
> Besides, it would be completely pointless, what use would 68K assembly be to a PPC programmer using C? Code is unreadable at the best of times so it’d be a lot quicker to read the API references and implement the API that way – so thats exactly what they did do.
It’s not pointless since it’s the only way to really see what the system does. Anyway, seeing the internal implementation might give good hints how to reimplement something.
As for PPC programmers using C in MorphOS project I bet many of them know 68k assembler. Target language (C) is also irrelevant. It’s still obviously useful to know how to reimplement something:)
Disassembling is not easy, but it’s not uncommon at all. Personally (I’m not involved in any OS project) I have found disassembling amiga kickstart roms very enlightening.
btw. disassembling is not illegal in itself. Saying that disassembling is illegal is equivalent to saying that ‘hexdump /path/to/binary’ is illegal. Even reimplementing something by looking at disassembly dumps might not be illegal, but it gets trickier. In MorphOS case I believe use of disassembling is justified since AmigaOS is not totally documented. One needs not only reimplement features, but bugs too. However, I don’t really care if it’s illegal or not. It’s just the way it’s by hackers.
I know that when I say it’s different, I know some say “hey idiot, don’t you know it’s different?”, in which I have to respond, a qualified YES! How different? Butter and peanut butter? No, more like the diference between toast and english muffin.
As for reversing: depending on if it’s legal where you are from, and how you are able to reverse the code tells you whether or not you will be able to do it correctly. I can say, in places where it’s legal to reverse engineer binary (hexadecimal as well, go ahead and say it now) format code, you will stand much better chance of successfully recreating the entire source package without problems.
As for Morphos and MOS? I seriously doubt MOS implements the Morphos API, but if it did, it would be an incredible techical feat, seeing that Morphos is probably a C derivative and MOS is in pascal.
As for hacking. Are you sure you don’t mean cracking? These are two totally different concepts, and the differences between the way these two types of people and the way they do things are worlds apart.
Again, I put it here, because of it’s supposed appearance to the Amiga workbench design. All these are in the same family of software and hardware systems.
But then, for the most part, Amiga(and Amiga folks, post-Comadore Amiga) hasn’t been very friendly to the outside world at all. I don’t care if you are running amiga OS on a 16 way ppc 970 board, if the attitude don’t match what you tout as “user friendly”, then go to your garage, take your computer, and smash it.
It, like you, is hostile and offensive to others.
As for whether they are the same camp. Hey! That is something few of us know for sure, it’s argumentative at best. Who was first? I don’t recall either one really breaking it at a major expo, but I suppose BeGeistert was major at one time.
Then again, amiga folks used to have big shows too, a long time ago. A lot has changed.
Butterfly is also a big marketing icon at Microsoft.
Scary. Butterflies are cool. Msft’s Butterfly is fake looking.
Msft’s Butterfly sucks, but I think they were first.
Yow.
What good is being first, if you suck?