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New AmigaOS On Top Of Linux
tommy.tonteri@arcada.fi writes, "Amiga released (yet another) plan for the future at an Amiga-show in St. Louis on Sunday. They plan on making a new OS that will be hosted on top of (Red Hat) Linux. Amiga's partners in this new effort include Sun, RedHat and Corel. Yet another impressive-sounding plan, hope they will finally be able to pull this one off..." I of course will believe it when I see it.
Hopefully, it is true that this is just a development platform, and that Tao's Elate kernel will eventually ship. I haven't seen this system in action yet, but it's hard to believe that anything running on top of an OS like Linux is going to have satisfactory performance for Amiga end users.
Linux has a lot of neat things going for it, and x86 boxes are awefully fast these days, especially compared to 68k-based Amiga hardware. But put a 700 MHz Linux box right next to a 50 MHz Amiga (which is exactly the situation that I have at home) and then copy a few megabytes from a CD to hard disk. See how slow the GUI gets? Now try it on the Amiga. Ah, smooooooth.
People tell me that it's a good "feature" when a modern dynamic-scheduling OS keeps low-priority processes from starving even if it means that high-priority processes have to slow down a bit. Well, once you've used an Amiga, you know that "feature" is worse than useless. Maybe it makes sense for servers, but if you're running a GUI and there's a user sitting there who expects the machine to be snappy, it just doesn't work. (Low priority tasks are supposed to starve when the GUI needs to update! I don't give a rat's ass if copying a 20 Megabyte file takes an extra 400 milliseconds, but I sure as hell do care if the GUI ever makes me wait that long!)
This was one of the reasons that QNX Neutrino looked so promising. With a realtime kernel, you should be able to guarantee that the GUI keeps up with human perception. QNX Neutrino had the potention to meet (or even exceed!) Amiga users' expectations. With something like Linux, the GUI's responsiveness is held hostage by the machine's load. (And apparently even an I/O bound process is enough to screw things up?!)
Let's hope that Tao's Elate kernel avoids the same technological mistake that Windows and Unix made. Otherwise, it seems unlikely that users of ten-year-old Amigas will be interested in downgrading to the "technology" of the 21st century.
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The new Amiga OS is supposed to be the Tao Elate. This OS can be run hosted on for example Linux. However the announcements so far just states that the developer boxes will run the os hosted (just to speedup development).
Does this strike anyone else as an attempt to get extra publicity by slipping the word linux wherever possible. Most of us can agree that the Amiga was a lovely machine in it's day, but a machine as this described will be no more Amiga than a PC with the badge changed. If there is any respect left isn't it about time we turned of the life support machine and let the platform rest in peace.