Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 29th Oct 2009 22:24 UTC, submitted by Andrew Duffell
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: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.
RE[2]: Video acceleration
by torbenm on Fri 30th Oct 2009 13:26
in reply to "RE: Video acceleration"
Member since:2007-04-23
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.
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.
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Member since:
2007-04-23
I think a good way to handle this is to target OpenGL. This way, the effort can be re-used when proting RISC OS to another platform -- you just need OpenGL drivers.