Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?
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Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?
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Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?
#2"A software emulation of 32-bit ARM would be needed, with perhaps a 10x performance drop."
Well, my Archimedes was 8Mhz, and my Pi is 1500Mhz, so we have some room there perhaps?
Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?
#3"A software emulation of 32-bit ARM would be needed, with perhaps a 10x performance drop." Well, my Archimedes was 8Mhz, and my Pi is 1500Mhz, so we have some room there perhaps?
Which is fine, but the things we do with our home computers today are not the same things we did in the late 80s.
Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?
#4RISC OS is written mostly in ARM assembly, but it's a pretty complete (if dated) OS. I think it would be interesting to convert the sources to LLVM-IR and then abstract the hardware specific parts giving you a cross platform version of RISC-OS. Yeah, it'd be a lot of work ... but I think it'd be very cool.
Why?
25 years ago there were dozens of OS's: AIX, Ultrix/OSF-1/Tru64, HP/UX, DG/UX, SCO (yuck), MS-DOS, Dynix/PTX, Solaris/SunOS, Windows, MSDOS, Mac, VMS, RISC-OS, Amiga, BeOS etc. etc. Now we're down to a handful of OSs with a large amount of computing now converging on Intel/Linux -- FWIW, I have nothing against Linux, I've used it since the early Slackware / pre 1.0 kernel days.
But I do believe competition is a good thing and the current trend for OS (and processor) convergence is worrying to me. I'd like to see more innovation and diversity in this space.
Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?
#5Whenever I see RISC OS I always assume it's something for RISC V.
I know this is not about that actually, just makes me think about it.
But obviously it's for original RISC i.e. ARM. But anyway I still wonder if something like RISC OS could work on RISC V.
I saw a youtube demo of someone running RISC OS on Raspberry Pi and it was very snappy. Something older like that has had less time to acquire features (that can slow it down or just be bloat).
Besides eliminating bloat, I feel like RISC V is an opportunity to start with some new assumptions. So I am interested to hear how operating systems and software evolve for it. Linux is great but I believe that there is always room for a fresh approach after a few decades.
So I wonder if things like Fuchsia or MirageOS or new Rust things etc. will be targeted to RISC V.
Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?
#6"A software emulation of 32-bit ARM would be needed, with perhaps a 10x performance drop." Well, my Archimedes was 8Mhz, and my Pi is 1500Mhz, so we have some room there perhaps?
I saw some YouTube videos of RISC OS running on Pi.
Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?
#7"A software emulation of 32-bit ARM would be needed, with perhaps a 10x performance drop." Well, my Archimedes was 8Mhz, and my Pi is 1500Mhz, so we have some room there perhaps?
Which is fine, but the things we do with our home computers today are not the same things we did in the late 80s.
If the things we do with with our home computers are crunching in kernel space instead of in userland, someone's done something wrong.
Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?
#8Whenever I see RISC OS I always assume it's something for RISC V. I know this is not about that actually, just makes me think about it. But obviously it's for original RISC i.e. ARM. But anyway I still wonder if something like RISC OS could work on RISC V. I saw a youtube demo of someone running RISC OS on Raspberry Pi and it was very snappy. Something older like that has had less time to acquire features (that can s…
> But obviously it's for original RISC i.e. ARM.
Not sure if you actually mean that, but to me it sounds like you're implying that ARM is the "original RISC".
The first RISC processor was called RISC-I and came out of Berkeley research in 1981.
Around the same time came out the MIPS cpu, from Standford university, by a group who shortly after founded a company that by 1985 commercialized the first RISC CPU, the R2000.
ARM, SPARC and PA-RISC came out just about the same time.
The ideas were brewing for some time, but I think it's safe to say historically that the name "RISC" was not invented by ARM and that the R in ARM references a pre-existing term that has been developed at Berkeley.
Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is fine, but the things we do with our home computers today are not the same things we did in the late 80s.
If the things we do with with our home computers are crunching in kernel space instead of in userland, someone's done something wrong.
The article's talking about running 32-bit applications in emulation, with a 64-bit native kernel.
> Then a rewrite of RISC OS for 64-bit ARM chips would require a 32-bit emulation layer for old apps to run -- and very slowly at that, when ARM chips no longer execute 32-bit code directly. A software emulation of 32-bit ARM would be needed, with perhaps a 10x performance drop.
Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?
#10"A software emulation of 32-bit ARM would be needed, with perhaps a 10x performance drop." Well, my Archimedes was 8Mhz, and my Pi is 1500Mhz, so we have some room there perhaps?
Which is fine, but the things we do with our home computers today are not the same things we did in the late 80s.
Maybe so, but I'd imagine most of the legacy 32-bit apps you'd be running in emulation here on your 64-bit RISC OS system are from the late 80s (or maybe the early-to-mid-90s), doing those late 80s things.