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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?

#11
Thanks to Castle's mysterious one big customer it has survived into its fourth decade.

I’d previously missed this piece of lore. Anyone got any more info on it? I’m trying to picture what critical system built on RISC OS would have required ongoing maintenance and am coming up blank.

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

#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 could have a single-address-space OS where physical memory is identically mapped in each process' address space, while still preserving memory protection. A privileged process in such an OS might effectively be exempt from memory protection altogether, which would provide compatibility for legacy apps.

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

#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...

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

#14

Thanks to Castle's mysterious one big customer it has survived into its fourth decade. I’d previously missed this piece of lore. Anyone got any more info on it? I’m trying to picture what critical system built on RISC OS would have required ongoing maintenance and am coming up blank.

Got to wonder whether it’s something like ncipher/Thales due to the van someren/aleph1 connection.

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

#15

Thanks to Castle's mysterious one big customer it has survived into its fourth decade. I’d previously missed this piece of lore. Anyone got any more info on it? I’m trying to picture what critical system built on RISC OS would have required ongoing maintenance and am coming up blank.

Don't know, but there was a mysterious entity that nearly bought the rump of Acorn IIRC to keep producing RiscPCs. Due to some fumble the deal fell through. I vaguely remember it being some kind of media-tech company. Probably the same mysterious entity.

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

#16
post #8
post #5

Whenever 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…

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.

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

#17
post #8
post #5

Whenever 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…

Okay so it was just the most popular RISC and not the original one.

So good job on that correction but it doesn't seem necessary to downvote me. I thought I had some interesting comments about the future of operating systems on RISC.

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

#18
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
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