| Subject: RE: Ideas on new Atari |
Author: Evan Langlois (67.187.51.187)
Date: 03-12-2005 06:34
Well, MiNT is a multitasking OS with no MMU. I don't have enough experience with the OS to give an informed opinion, but I have heard of some horror stories and the API looks frightening enough.
MiNT has the opportunity to go with memory protection, but it doesn't make use of the MMU to its full potential as most apps simply wouldn't work right. Too much of the common coding practices do things that you would NEVER consider in a typical Linux box.
However, look at how difficult some things are in a Unix/Linux, and with the Atari, you just drop in an interrupt handler and be done with it. Sure there are APIs for most things, but they often involve setting a handler anyway - look at playing DMA sounds.
Now, my personal ideas on a "modern" OS would actually go back about 30 years to a true document centric system where you don't have apps, just tools to work on documents and you don't have New/Open/Save .. things just exist (with plenty of levels of Undo/Redo). Guess that never caught on though.
What I don't like about Pegasos is that they made a new desktop OS, and there isn't much of a market for that. Linux works because of the existing Unix code base. Trying to start a new codebase from scratch and a whole new set of apps and drivers ... Linux got in over 10 years ago, and its still behind. I don't see a market to justify the OS, let alone the hardware. Hardware is there to run the software, software does work. The cost involved in a new hardware platform to run unwritten software is kinda steep without the right market, and with the biggest software base being translated Amiga software ... Pegasos is more like Icarus.
Dope hasn't impressed me so far. I haven't seen a really clear advantage to what looks like an over-design of real-time capability in a window system with no real-time apps to test it out. The whole "look at different windows on the same screen" thing is already possible with X.
Hell ... Wine is impressive. Runs Windows applications under X, using the stock window manager (where Windows apps normally have to handle those events themselves), and does it all using X calls, so Windows apps become as network transparent as X calls - so much for Citrix!
Now, as for MMU-less multitasking. The StrongARM doesn't have an MMU, or even an FPU for that matter, and it did seamless multitasking and multimedia just fine. Hell, even my Cybiko multitasks well. I don't think its the memory protection that really is the best part of an MMU, but the other things you can do with it, such as memory mapped files, demand paging, and hardware virtualization. Memory protection only helps when the software has a nasty bug and happens to hit an address that is owned by another process .. most broken apps hit address 0 and die anyway.
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