It was a nice departure last week, to write about not so serious matters, in order to make fun of everything and everyone (including myself). Today, however, it's back to more serious matters (if you can call computer matters 'serious', of course): Amiga OS4. Or how it will fail utterly if Hyperion/Amiga Inc. don't get their heads out of the sand. Note: Sunday Eve Column.
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Member since:2006-01-02
I've never seen any of the Hyperion people claim that memory protection is slow, in fact there are rudementry memory protection systems in OS4 to stop programs walking over parts of the kernel. The problem is that the AmigaOS API was never really designed for memory protection (IIRC the early 68k series chips had no MMU hardware for memory protection) and there are far too many apps that ignore the API specs (Notice MorphOS doesn't have it either for the same reason) so while you could change the API/ABI and break all exsting apps but there just aren't enough new apps to make this viable.
Member since:2005-07-06
"The problem is that the AmigaOS API was never really designed for memory protection (IIRC the early 68k series chips had no MMU hardware for memory protection) and there are far too many apps that ignore the API specs (Notice MorphOS doesn't have it either for the same reason)"
The old, obsolete amigaos api shouldn't even be a consideration here, because the code using this have to run in a software emulation anyway, so it's naturally sandboxed.
"in fact there are rudementry memory protection systems in OS4 to stop programs walking over parts of the kernel."
But not between apps ? Why, oh why ? With the old crap sandboxed away in a 68k emulator, they could have redesigned the API and memory management from scratch, in a way that would have worked with real memory protection.
I remember that it was kinda the general consensus among developers back when Amiga still interested me and people were already hoping for some messiah somewhere to descend from the skies with a new OS and hardware.
Member since:2005-06-29
"I've never seen any of the Hyperion people claim that memory protection is slow"
I didn't say it was Hyperion guys. Just some OS4 users (I don't have URL at hand, but the discussion was on AW.net). And yes, MP and RT makes OS works slower because it adds additional things to care about. AmigaOS is fast because of that. But it also makes it easy to kill and thus not suitable for a embedded space (would you like to have your elevator go down just because OS crashed?)
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Member since:
2005-06-29
"I'm pretty sure that in this day and age you can still find people there claiming that memory protection is bad."
Spot on! They claim it makes your system slow. Don't make me go to RT. ;-)