Ars Technica Reviews AmigaOS 4.0

Amiga Lover writes "While tales of the troubles behind the Amiga's ownership abound over the last 10 years, work has been going on in the background for newer releases of the operating system that powered some of the most desirable computers from the 1980s. You can now buy brand new Amiga motherboards, and the operating system is very close to a final release. Jeremy Reimer from arstechnica reviews the current developer preview of AmigaOS 4.0, going over this new small and fast OS in thorough arstechnica style."

Comments

Too pricey

[denjin]

While I loved my Amiga in the day, I can't justify spending $1375 for a G3-800 system basd on the new Micro systems.

This is from softhut, but I don't want to direct link since it is slow anyway:

AMIGA ONE PRECONFIGURED SYSTEMS

Micro A1 System:
First True Luggable / LAN Boy Amiga System !!

See Case Images
Micro A1-C Motherboard with OS4
750fx G3 Processor @ 800MHz
Built-In Sound
80GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
DVD/CDRW Combo Drive
2 USB Ports, 10/100 Ethernet
Keyboard and Mouse
------ $ 1375.00

All completely installed, tested and ready to run

Re:Modern OS?

[amigabill]

AmigaOS has had preemptive multitasking since day 1 back in the 1980's.

Memory protection is another matter, it's not there as Linux users would expect it to be, no. It's a highly desired feature of course, but implementing it properly is an issue as it conflicts with some fundamental aspects of AmigaOS arcitecture. We want it, and it will likely happen someday, but current priorities fundamentally revolve around getting the OS ported to PowerPC native and getting it to run on new PowerPC motherboards, porting the 680x0 assembly to C, involving a great deal of "classic Amiga hardware" dependencies, as none of that hardware is present on new motherboards.

Once the fundamental porting is done then it will be time to look at rearchitecting things to allow memory protection, multiple users (it's currently a single-user OS so no user or group file or directory protection concepts). I don't know what all the project managment has in mind for adding such features, but users and developers do want them.

Re:Modern OS?

[Gadzinka]

[removed question about true multitasking and memory protection]

Amiga OS had both those in 1985, IIRC.

No, you don't remember it correctly. Amiga OS had true, preemptive multitasking in 1985, but it doesn't have memory protection to this day. Nor does it have virtual memory, or makes any other use of MMU present in every modern processor.

Yes, you could install Enforcer notifying you about writes to system memory, or VMM permitting swapping to disk in case the real memory is exhausted. But both these programs weren't part of system and lost of programs crashed when they were present and running. I remember having exceptions list in VMM longer than... certain body parts of pr0n stars ;)

Other than that, Amiga OS was quite remarkable piece of software at that time with certain solutions still not duplicated in today's operating systems.

Robert