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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?

#21

Post by qz2 »

RISC OS is quite frankly dead in its current incarnation. And I say that as a somewhat prolific Acorn customer in the 80s and 90s. It was after all a quick hack because they weren’t going to deliver ARX. Some of the impedance mismatches between the OS and everything else in the universe are glaringly irritating today such as paths and file type metadata.

But a lot of the better ideas from the operating system should be carried forwards into something else. I’m not talking about sticking something on top of Linux but something completely different. Perhaps a resurrection of ARX and the UI concepts from RISC OS would be interesting.

Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?

#22

Post by saagarjha »

makapuf wrote: post #18
lsllc wrote: post #4

RISC 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/PT…

Listing some I know of: linux windows macos freebsd redox fuchsia ios android(sharing the kernel but sufficiently different from linux) chromeos plus many more experimental but available os

Chrome OS is Linux too.

Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?

#23

Post by pjmlp »

saagarjha wrote: post #22
makapuf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listing some I know of: linux windows macos freebsd redox fuchsia ios android(sharing the kernel but sufficiently different from linux) chromeos plus many more experimental but available os

Chrome OS is Linux too.

ChromeOS uses Linux kernel, userspace has nothing to do with Linux.

Even Crostini and ARC++ execute inside their own VM alongside their own kernel flavour.

With Google turning the Web into ChromeOS, it matters even less, given how many OSes Chrome runs on.

Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?

#24

Post by pjmlp »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #3
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #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?

Which is fine, but the things we do with our home computers today are not the same things we did in the late 80s.

Plenty of them actually are.

A rusty Amiga 2000, with Internet connection could handle like 80% of the stuff I use my 2009 laptop for.

Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?

#25

Post by AlexanderDhoore »

zozbot234 wrote: post #12

> It's too late for virtual memory, and we don't really need it any more -- but the programming methods that allow virtual memory, letting programs spill over onto disk if the OS runs low on memory, are the same as those that enforce the protection of each program's RAM from all other programs. Strictly speaking, I don't think this is true - virtual memory and process-based memory protection are separate issues. One…

That's the difference between an MMU and MPU.

The first (MMU) adds virtual memory to the story, while the second (MPU) simply protects certain areas of memory.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/whats-difference-between-mmu-a...

Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?

#26

Post by Teongot »

wk_end wrote: post #9
082349872349872 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The cost of simulating 32-bit ARM on 64-bit ARM is nothing like 10x if you try hard enough

https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/files/56078084/...

Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?

#27

Post by mattbee »

I did the fun part of a RISC OS emulator 20 years ago - http://riscose.sourceforge.net/ - i.e. WINE but for RISC OS applications.

It got as far as being able to run the RISC OS C compiler, compile and run its own output for a few command line applications.

But then we got to the stage of needing a test suite. Then my friend & collaborator on the project (Chris Rutter) died at the age of 19, then I finished college, had to find work and lost most of my RISC OS connections & nostalgia.

There was definitely a rich seam of RISC OS software in 2000 that Linux desktop could have used - great text editors and word processors and Sibelius. But Linux got most of that pretty fast.

Also I don't think RISC OS would have escaped the trap of most desktop OSes - that a desktop OS with native applications became a niche, expensive taste. By 2010 most desktop computer users were looking for a host for a web browser, and RISC OS itself is still spectaularly unsuited to that - hostile code, multithreading, support for proprietary blobs (at least in 2000) etc. etc.

That doesn't stop me missing it though!

Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?

#28

Post by marktangotango »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #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?

Gameboy advance emulators emulate 32bit arm, plenty of those around.

Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?

#29

Post by mattbee »

adrianmsmith wrote: post #13

> No memory protection or hardware-assisted memory management This isn’t true. There are many modern features missing from RISC OS but memory protection isn’t one of them. Each process sees its memory at the same logical address, it doesn’t have any way of accessing other process’ memory. The process’ memory starts at the address 0x8000. http://www.riscos.com/support/developers/riscos6/memory/logi...

From - err - memory, the OS used some of the memory protection in hardware, but it didn't use it with security in mind.

I'm pretty sure an application could rewrite important kernel tables below &8000. And if you were using any shared libraries, these were all implemented as kernel modules, with no guard rails.

So it was kinda safe against some accidental access errors, but not at all a secure environment, and definitely possible to blow up the whole machine.

Re: Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?

#30

Post by ithkuil »

ncmncm wrote: post #16
ithkuil wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The original RISC was the IBM 801, in ~1975, or arguably even the CDC 6600 in 1965. It is hard to identify anything that originated in the RISC-1.

Didn't register windows originate at Berkeley?

Sure, the IBM 801, the CDC 6600 and others were forerunners, but it was the Berkeley research project that popularized the acronym IIRC.

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