AmigaOS and The x86 Question
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 26th Mar 2009 23:34 UTC
Amiga & AROS Despite the recent emergence of several new ways to actually run AmigaOS 4.0, the supply of machines is still extremely small, and not very future proof. As such, one of the most recurring questions within the Amiga community is why don't they port the darn thing to x86?
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SamuraiCrow
Member since:
2005-11-19

Interesting. Are there currently any LLVM operating systems out there?

I thought that Apple was working on something like an LLVM-based OS for the iPod Touch and iPhone but I may be mistaken. There was also a mention of a Linux version on http://www.llvm.org/ called LLVA that was going to be such a thing. I don't know how successful it was.

Amiga Inc. had something like that up on their website based on an early LLVM equivalent called AmigaDE but it was overpriced and delivered underrated performance. AmigaOS 5.0 was supposed to be cross-platform and I think that's the whole reason that Hyperion is fighting this.

Conceptually, you'd still need enough OS to bootstrap LLVM anyway even though it supports static compiling like a regular compiler, it would have to do the final code generation at install time.

Reply Parent Score: 3

tylerdurden Member since:
2009-03-17

Nope. Apple uses LLVM to do things like OpenGL shaders and OpenCL kernels. Which is the sort of applications LLVM makes sense.

I have no clue what you mean by a LLVM as an OS. That is not the target of LLVMs at all...

Reply Parent Score: 1

SamuraiCrow Member since:
2005-11-19

Nope. Apple uses LLVM to do things like OpenGL shaders and OpenCL kernels. Which is the sort of applications LLVM makes sense.

I have no clue what you mean by a LLVM as an OS. That is not the target of LLVMs at all...


My idea is to use LLVM as an installer and packager for libraries and applications. Most of AmigaOS fits into one of those categories. All that would be needed is for enough OS to boot the LLVM command line version of llc to allow the bitcode files representing some of the higher-level functionality of AmigaOS to be installed as a thin binary.

The only time you'd need proprietary binary codes is to access the BIOS/Kickstart/UBoot-level functionality and the filesystem required to install the supporting OS functions that are required to load the llc command. This would include HD-Toolbox and the CD-ROM and hard-disk FFS2 filesystems, Dos.library, and the Exec.library kernal. Since most of the libraries in LLVM compile statically into the llc command, there would be most of the operating system that could be made at install time into the hard disk from bitcode.

Reply Parent Score: 2