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While the heading refers to Linux on Macs, there's a number of other PPC machines that'll run Linux

a pegasos I or II is a PPC based machine, there's also Amiga One boards - a new Mini-ITX AmigaOne looks REALLY appealing, as long as it's not slugged with the "Amiga Tax" (double the price for the privilege of being able to run AmigaOS4 if it's released). a Mini ITX board with a GHz or more G4 - not a scaled down VIA type setup, but a full honest-to-goodness G4. That's appealing.

There's also several VMEbus boards based on PPC chips from PPC440 to G4s, and a newer one out soon from Momentum computer, Dual G5s on an ATX board. Pricey, but it's just a reference board at the moment.

If prices dropped on these, especially on the Momentum board, I could see these being real alternatives to x86, especially for people a bit worried about MS's palladium plans. A mac is a wonderful thing, but if you ask 'Why bother" about putting Linux over the top of a machine that'll run OSX, one of the above solutions might be an option.

No that's partially true. There ARE indeed new Amiga Hardware either in the AmigaONE or the Pegasos II. It's a new PowerPC architecture with industry standard formfactor and components. I have one here running MorphOS a native PowerPC Operating System with full AmigaOS 3.1 API compatibility + MC680x0 JIT for emulating old Amiga programms in full speed (even faster)

For some cool ScreenShots go to my Web page Here the Link or for more look at MorphZone (top right Image Gallery).

greetings,

oGALAXYo

Now that's an Amiga attitude! If you were living in 1993 what you say might be relevant, but none of us exist in the past. It's 2004.

Normally I'd agree, but this is an article reminiscing about 20 years ago, so I'd say looking to the past is relevant.

The fastest Amiga that can run a real, released AmigaOS is what, a PPC604? yes. It's a PPC604. Don't go counting the AmigaOne and it's generic G3 or G4 motherboard because then you're falling into the typical Amiga trap of living for vaporware. Perhaps when AmigaOS4 is actually released and not a "Beta that will be here next month!!" you can only be 5 years behind the times.

Well, you could run Amiga software on a G4 with MorphOS on a Pegasos (yes, it's not the original AmigaOS, but then OS X isn't the same as the original MacOS either - that was ditched a few years ago).

I did. The fun thing is that most stores won't let you even try it on their hardware. (After all, it could installed something, or destroy the demo unit, or eat the CEO's lunch, or cause baby Jesus to cry. Anything is possible) Brought a CD wallet with Knoppix and my Net and FreeBSD install disks with me just incase the employees weren't watching^W^W^W^W they let me try them and see a dmesg on 'em. ;)

Which would have helped me avoid this laptop. PCMCIA slots cause system crashes unless I treat them with kid gloves, the USB seems to have problems, and it's way to fast.... Well, I guess it's not all bad. ;)

Personally, if I get another desktop, it'd probably be a PegasosPPC based system. They list not only multiple GNU/Linux distros as supported, but QNX and OpenBSD, with a FreeBSD port in the works, so it helps keep down some of the guess work. If only they made laptops...

It don't look real available to me. It looks like "maybe almost sort of available hardware that only runs Linux at the moment".

Don't you think the fact that they talk of the "Pegasos II" kind of implies there might have been a first model?

The Pegasos has been on sale since sometime 2002 I believe. To be pedantic, yes it is not being produced anymore, but there are possibly still some in stock at retailers, and that doesn't change the fact that new machines have been produced.

Well thats a good reason to purchase an AmigaOne at a dealer closest to you, beofore AmigaOS4 is released and get the OS for free.

Or you could purchase the Pegasos and get MorphOS (an Amiga like operating system) for free.

Oh, and sneak peaks at "Maybe Almost Sort of Available Hardware that only runs Linux at the moment" doesn't count.

What about available hardware running a new Amiga-compatible OS?

Unfortunately, whoever has owned the Amiga rights in the years since Commodore (Escom, Gateway, and now Amiga) have failed to produce anything other than a couple of OS updates (better than nothing, certainly, but not a huge step forward). Some new hardware, the "AmigaOne" (from Eyetech), has been produced and on sale for about a year, but so far only runs Linux.

But some of the "Amiga-like OS's" mentioned by the AmiZilla Guidelines can be considered "new", even if they aren't official Amigas. There's Amithlon (based on a modified Linux kernel and uses emulation to run AmigaOS on any standard PC - unfortunately development stopped due to disagreements between the developers and the publisher), and MorphOS (runs on the Pegasos).

Have you seen that hardware? It's five-year-old PowerPC G3 stuff and it doesn't even sound like it's in full production yet.

The "AmigaOne" hardware is out, and includes a G4 version. The problem is AmigaOS 4, which as you say seems like a perfect example of vapourware (it's been promised since summer 2000 IIRC).

Amiga is truley the kings of old school vaporware.

Amiga Inc the company, perhaps, but not the Amiga (ie, the computer) market. For example, if you want new machines, there's MorphOS and the Pegasos (Amiga compatible computers which are as close as say OS X is to MacOS; they just don't own the Amiga trademarks).

Anyone know much of the non x86 small machines or boards? I know of pegasosppc and their micro-ATX boards, and an upcoming (hopefully) AmigaOne that's a full G3 or G4 Mini-ITX board, and rumours of ARM Mini-ITX.

Any PPC Mini-ITX boards that won't be lumbered with Amiga licensing fees?

And little people (ehem, few programmers and developers) has variants of PowerPC when www.pegasosppc.comwas emerged.

So, porting PowerPC will be very slow :(

open4free

No need to buy a Mac.

Re:again? (Score:2, Insightful)
by downix (84795) * on 4:18 23 September 2003 (#7030423)
(http://www.pegasosppc.com/)

At least he was generous enough to include the link and not post as Anonymous Coward.

So when is this fabled Pegasos 2 comming out then? When it's done? And at a fraction of the cost? 1/2, 1/3, 7/11, 19/14?

Some choice quotes:

During the deposition of Mr. McEwen, he admitted Amiga was insolvent. It currently has outstanding debt of 2.2 million dollars

McEwen has testified that Amiga's bank account balance is currently "about a hundred dollars"

There's a lot more detail in the file, but given the history of the company in general, and what seems to be a fairly consistant lack of producing an actual product, I'd be wary about actually spending any money with them (note, I'm referring to the OS, not the hardware linked in this article).

Incidentally, this is not a troll. There was a time when I was as fanatical an Amiga user as the next person. Personally, I got sick of all the "we'll have something next year, no really" promises about 6 years ago. Glad I didn't wait, frankly.

Of course, if you're a true die-hard fanatic, there are other products that might be of more interest.

Buy a Pegasos G5 when they come out and run Linux on it and you'll have yourself a quiet and energy efficient 64 bit desktop with no lock-in effect.

For those of you who don't know, the company behind Pegasos is focused on creating the ultimate "geek" machine. A number of Pegasos machines have been provided to various alternative OS developments, and it seems that the alternative OS market is a good niche that should allow this company to thrive.

from www.pegasosppc.com/operating_systems.php
"The following Operating Systems are in final stages of being ported to the Pegasos Platform and should be completed soon: AROS, Gentoo, Knoppix, NewOS, OpenBSD, QNX
The following Operating Systems are in the early stages of being ported to the Pegasos Platform: AmigaDE, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBeOS, OpenDarwin, Zynot
The following Operating Systems can be run on the Pegasos through emulation: Amiga OS 3.x, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X"

Personally speaking, as a fan of silent machines and a user of a PC that exclusively runs Linux, I am very tempted by this machine. I don't have to worry about the company going bust because by running Linux, I can easily switch hardware platforms should I need to, and I can play with Morphos and all this Mac stuff too.

PC? PCs sucked, Amiga was THE machine.

Therefor my expections for PCs was uhm, nothing actually, DOS and Windows sucked, the PCs was expensive and boring. Why would I expect anything from that?

On the other side the A1200 and A4000 had been released, so I guess I would have some crazy thought if you had asked me where it would end in 10 years. But as we all know Commodore screwed it all up, and todays is even worse.

It's so weird how the death of a computer platform can stop the whole computer evolution ;). Todays PCs are no more than last decades Amigas =)

AMIGA RULES, PC SUXX! Btw, keep up the good work Genesi (Creators of the Pegasos PPC platform which ships together with MorphOS) and of course the AROS-guys.

I would pay the extra money for a mac just to get macosx if i could afford it. I would gladely pay a few $100 extra to be able to run MorphOS on my hardware, and I would gladely probably pay $100 or so for a working good easy to set-up no-problems-at-all-unix on x86 to. I would however never pay for windows since i.m.h.o. even the free linux dists and *BSDs works better for my usage.

You're wrong I'm afraid, there's new working Amigas out there now. Have a look at the AmigaOne and the Pegasos (which is almost an Amiga).

That's not entirely true, the motherboard/system controller is proprietary as well. So you still need a motherboard manufacturer. There is at least one company doing this, but they're not exactly producing leading edge technology.

New PPC machines have been released. You can buy them now from a dealer new your or from the manufactorer...

The boards are as follows.
Pegasos From Genisi

AmigaOne From Eyetech Based on MAI Teron design.

Soon Pegasos II From Genisi

The pegasos board runs various operating systems including the flagship os MorphOS

AmigaOnes run the new AmigaOS4 developed by Hyperion Entertainment.

There are other PowerPC motherboard suppliers our there still, notably Genesi Sarl which ships a Micro-ATX board of its own design, as opposed to the OEMed Mai Teron board that both TerraSoft and Eyetech have been licensing. There are a limited number of Pegasos 1 motherboards available from Genesi and a Pegasos 2 motherboard is in development for release later this year. Additionally Eyetech has been pre-selling their "AmigaONE" boards, which as I mentioned are based on the old Mai Teron design.

Please note that the current Peagsos 1 boards use the same chipset as the Teron boards, except for the addition of a chip dubbed the April which fixes some bugs in the chipset. The new Pegasos 2 boards will use a completely different chipset from Marvell.

Apart from Macs, there aren't that many consumer priced/targeted PPC computers around.

Yes, it's news IMO.

The Hardware:
www.pegasosppc.com

MorphOS Applications and links:

www.morphos-news.de

The Teron CX is one of the two boards that will be sold under the licensed "AmigaOne" trademark. The other is the Teron PX. Read this comment. There will be no more "new Amigas".

Graphics? It's whatever AGP card there's drivers for.

The Pegasos, designed by the old Amiga gurus at bplan, is a similar board, but in a smaller Micro-ATX form factor, minus one PCI slot, plus a slot for CPU modules (the G3/600 is soldered down on the Teron CX), plus Firewire, plus on-board sound I/O including SPDIF (the Terons have an AMR slot), plus IrDA, plus a game port.

The Pegasos is cheaper than the Teron CX when that is sold as an "AmigaOne", and slightly more expensive than the Teron CX sold "normally" by e.g. Terrasoft.

This document was written to describe MorphOS, how it came about, its workings, its current status and future plans. Special thanks go to bplan and the MorphOS developers for the great deal of assistance given.

Introduction

MorphOS is a new Operating System for PowerPC RISC microprocessors which runs on the Pegasos computer and PowerUP (CyberstormPPC, BlizzardPPC) expansion cards for the Amiga. It has also been tested on the Mai Logic Teron CX and Teron PX evaluation boards. In the future MorphOS will also run on other Open Firmware based PowerPC machines and possibly some PowerPC based Apple Macintosh computers as well.

It currently runs on 603e, 604e, 750 and 7400 (Original G4) PowerPC processors.

MorphOS is a well named combination of the old and the new. It originally started in 1995 with a plan to migrate Amiga to PowerPC but eventually 'morphed' into an entire Operating System in it's own right which includes compatibility with Amiga applications. In the future it will change again becoming a truly modern, highly advanced operating system yet retaining compatibility with existing applications through it's system of OS boxes.

In the Beginning - The History of MorphOS

To add some perspective and for completeness, before going into detail, this section describes how the MorphOS project started and it's subsequent history.

The Amiga started on its long arduous path to the PowerPC processor in 1995. While there have been and still are other projects to do this, with MorphOS 1.0 the original project is finally being completed.

In September 1995 there was an agreement between Amiga Technologies and the German company phase5 to develop a migration path for the Amiga to move to the PowerPC from the Motorola 680x0 (68K) series processors which were coming to the end of their life, this was the genesis of the MorphOS project.

Unfortunately this agreement was short-lived as Amiga Technologies' parent company Escom went bankrupt. However the project did not die as phase5 decided to go ahead and continue with the migration process. This lead to phase5 launching in 1997 a series of PowerUP add-on cards for the Amiga providing RISC based acceleration for the first time. Programs ran on both the 68K and some functions were accelerated through the use of the PowerPC processor and a PPC native library.

There were many plans made and agreements between phase5 and other companies but as the numerous twists and turns in the Amiga story occurred companies went out of business and none of these plans came to fruition, eventually with the decline in the Amiga market phase5 themselves went bankrupt. Later a new company, bplan was formed and the project was picked up again but this time it was to be completed as an Operating System in it's own right without any components from the original. In 2000 as it moved towards completion, MorphOS was released as a public beta for PowerUP card owners.

The 2002 public MorphOS 1.0 release on the PowerPC based Pegasos represents the final chapter in the 7 year long transition to PowerPC from the original 68K based propriety hardware. MorphOS does not require the original hardware or include any of the original system software but it does very much include the same spirit and feeling - a computer which is fast and fun to use!

The Structure of MorphOS

The MorphOS System is based around the minimalist Quark microkernel. On top of the kernel are currently two "Boxes" the first, currently in the final stages of development is the A-Box, the second box currently in development is the significantly more advanced Q-Box.

At the time of writing (November 2002) most development has focused on the A-Box but considerable design work has been done on the Q-Box.

The A-Box can run Amiga RTG (Re-Targetable Graphics) applications as it includes a complete PowerPC native clean-room reimplementation of version 3.1 of the Amigas' Operating System (herein AOS) and a JIT (Just In Time compiler) based 68K emulator.

The Q-Box on the other hand shall be new and will require it's own applications, but by including compatibility with Amiga applications through the A-Box, MorphOS is able to start with an existing, mature application base while the Q-Box is in development.

It is also possible that in the future other boxes may be added allowing compatibility with applications from other operating systems. Possibilities here are to add Unix / Linux and BeOS application compatibility. It should however be noted that these are only possibilities at this point and various issues have to be considered before adding compatibility for these systems.

The A-Box

The original purpose of MorphOS was to keep the Amiga alive by providing an upgrade path to modern hardware.

Users can already use emulators to run original applications on other platforms but these work by emulating the 68K processor and the custom chips. While this emulation is complete and accurate, a great deal of potential performance is lost in doing all the emulation.

While MorphOS has moved on from what it was originally built for it still retains compatibility with AOS 3.1. However it uses a different technique which allows software to take full advantage of modern hardware. The A-Box includes a clean-room implementation of the AOS 3.1 API created using publicly available documentation. This has been written and compiled on the PowerPC so it is nearly 100% native. There is also a 68K emulator for existing applications, the performance of which is boosted significantly by a JIT (Just In Time compiler) which converts 68K code into native PowerPC code then caches it largely removing the overhead emulation usually incurs. In addition to being native, the A-Box is faster than the original at running applications due to different techniques and being used withinthe system. This provides a further boost in system performance.

For maximum performance however it is a simple process to compile code natively to the PPC. This allows Amiga applications to take full advantage of the PowerPC CPUs' performance.

One important point to make however is that there is no emulation of the Amiga custom chips. Consequently MorphOS cannot itself run applications which require them. This is not as much of a problem as one might imagine since applications from AOS 2.0 onwards have been able to use API calls which are not hardware dependant. If a user wants to run applications which require the custom chips (e.g. many games), they can use UAE (Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator), this provides emulation of the full Amiga hardware and runs on various platforms including MorphOS.

AOS originally ran on what are now obsolete systems with only a fraction of the computing power available in today's modern microprocessors. Amiga speeds were quoted in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), the MIPS rating for a 1Ghz IBM G3 is over 2,000 times higher than the original 68000 based Amiga. Despite this the original Amigas responsiveness was - and still is - very high. Consequently, given that the A-Box provides a more efficient PPC native implementation, it's responsiveness will appear surprisingly fast to any PC owner especially given the relatively low clock speed (600MHz) of the initial systems.

File Systems Support
MorphOS supports a number of File Systems and others can be supported via plug-ins:
OFS (Original File System)
FFS (Fast File System)
FFS 2 (Fast File System 2)
PFS 3 (Professional File System 3)
SFS (Smart File System)

Chill Out - The Ambient Desktop The MorphOS desktop replacement for Workbench is called Ambient and being part of the A-Box feels like the environment it emulates. It is able however to take advantage of the changes and advancements in the graphics system so unlike the Amigas' Workbench it supports 24bit displays and blending. Displaying the contents of a window while it's moving is another feature provided by the graphics system used by Ambient. MUI (Magic User Interface) is also incorporated making Ambient highly customizable.

Other Graphical Enhancements
Unlike the original, the graphics system is now fully abstracted away from the hardware, it has also been significantly enhanced with many new features such as transparency and overlays. Accelerated 3D graphics are implemented using the Rave3D API and a wrapper for the Warp3D API is in development, OpenGL compatibility is also in the pipeline.

The Audio system has also been improved with the addition of AHI, this is a retarget table API for Audio so Applications can take advantage of systems with audio hardware better than the original (these days, all of them).

When launched AOS was a highly advanced operating system, it included pre-emptive multitasking in 1985 - a feature not added to other desktop Operating Systems (i.e. to Windows or MacOS) until much later. Compared to modern Operating Systems however, the Amiga has it's fair share of limitations, i.e. there is no memory protection or virtual memory present as standard.

Because it includes a faithful re-implementation of the AOS 3.1 API specification the A-Box design was largely fixed and could not be made radically different. Consequently the A-Box has many of the same basic limitations present in the original. Some of these have been worked around with extensions but in some cases the limitations are either too difficult or impossible to remove without completely breaking compatibility with applications. These however are limitations of the A-Box, not MorphOS as a whole, the Q-Box shall not have these problems.

Q - The Future of MorphOS

The Q-Box
Up to now the development has been concentrated on the A-Box. In the future this focus shall switch to Q.

Q shall consist of an enhanced Quark kernel, a set of servers to provide functionality and the Q-Box in which applications run. The Quark Kernel itself is very small providing a hardware abstraction layer, drivers, memory management and message passing. Most of the real work will be done in the servers, i.e. Networking, File System, GUI, Media, Security, 2D/3D Graphics etc.

Applications shall run in the Q-Box and make API calls via a message passing system. The API shall not be locked to any single programming language so application developers will not be required to learn a new language. The message passing is also extremely fast, instead of transferring the data in the message, the memory location of the message is remapped to the application where the message is due. Small messages are directly copied as this method is faster for very small amounts of data.

Scalability and Other Bits
The message passing system used within MorphOS means the system can be highly scalable. The components sending and receiving messages can be running on different processors or even physically different computers and the messages will still get there. A windowing system over a network (a-la The X Windowing System) could be implemented in this manner but the result is likely to be a great deal more responsive. An X Windows compatible wrapper is planned so X Windows applications can be ported but the resulting speed on the desktop will be very different from those using current X Windows implementations.

The distributed capability of Q messaging means clustering will be possible without having to rewrite the entire OS. Applications requiring massive numbers of processors will be relatively simple to write under Q. One requirement of large scale applications is a large memory footprint, workstations and large servers have been 64 bit for many years now but this is yet to reach consumer level Operating Systems. Q was designed with 64 bit capability in mind from the start, it shall not be a bolt-on to an existing 32 bit OS. Applications will, from the start have access to address ranges much, much larger than existing desktop Operating Systems.

Microkernel Vs Macro Kernel
A common problem encountered in the development of microkernel Operating Systems is speed. This is due to the CPU having to context switch back and forth between the kernel and user processes, context switching is expensive in terms of computing power. The consequence of this has been that many Operating Systems have switched from their original microkernel roots and become closer to a macrokernel by moving functionality into the kernel, i.e. Microsoft moved graphics into the Windows NT kernel, Be moved networking inside, Linux began as a macrokernel so includes everything. This technique provides a speed boost but at the cost of stability and security since different kernel tasks can potentially overwrite one another's memory.

Given the above, one might wonder why Q can be based on a microkernel (strictly speaking it's only "microkernel like") and still expected to perform well. The answer to this lies in the fact that MorphOS runs on PowerPC and not x86 CPUs. It is a problem with the x86 architecture that causes context switches to be computationally expensive. Context switching on the PowerPC is in the region of 10 times faster, similar in speed to a subroutine call. This means PowerPC Operating Systems can use a microkernel architecture with all it's advantages yet without the cost of slow context switches. There are no plans for an x86 version of MorphOS, if this changes there will no doubt be internal changes to accommodate the different processor architecture.

Transition
At time of writing the Quark kernel exists but is incomplete. The rest of Q is still only at the planning stage, the large details have been worked out but the fine details have yet to be filled in. Drivers are for instance included in the A-Box where they can get to the hardware directly. In the future the drivers shall be moved into the Quark kernel where they will be independent of the A-Box and indeed of any other boxes, this has the advantage of making them usable by all the boxes. This move has been pre-planned so drivers were written with it in mind and the move shall be a relatively trivial operation.

Vapour Where?
Almost all the information here about the Q-Box is in the future and this could lead to accusations of us generating vapourware. We are only setting out our goals here and how we plan to achieve them. However as is normal in the world of computing things change so this is all subject to change. Development of complex systems always takes a great deal of time, we are looking at ways of getting the system into the market as soon as possible but the final product will of course take time.

The future will expand on the work already done and provide MorphOS users with a truly modern Operating System designed and built by now long experienced developers who know the benefits and advantages of the past but also have the knowledge and experience of what not to do and the paths not to follow.

Further Information

For details of MorphOS news and links see: www.morphos-news.de

For more details of the Pegasos main board see: www.pegasosppc.com

v1.1 Copyright Thendic-France SARL November 2002

All terms and names used in this white paper are trademarks and property of their respective owners.

MicroATX mainboard (236 mm x 172 mm)
133 MHz processor slot
600 MHz PowerPC G3 750 CXe - to Dual PowerPC G4 MPC 7450
PC133 RAM (two sockets), up to 2 GB
AGP slot
PCI subsystem with three slots, optional Riser Card
IEEE1394 (Firewire) VIA VT6306 with 100/200/400 MBit data transfer
10/100 MBit Realtek Phyceiver 8201 Ethernet
USB I/O system VIA 8231 with four connectors
AC97 sound subsystem Sigmatel STAC 9766 Codec with mic input, line in/out and headset connector
IRDA for infra-red remote control
ATA100 VIA 8231 with two channels for upto four ATA devices
PS/2 mouse connector
RS232 (serial) port
Centronics port
Floppy
Gameport for PC-compatible joysticks
Open firmware

Two operating systems included : MorphOS and Linux