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Timberwolf (Firefox) Beta For AmigaOS
An anonymous reader writes "News from the world of AmigaOS that the Beta version of Timberwolf (a.k.a. Firefox) was made available last month."
Timberwolf is a port of Firefox to the AmigaOS (the name change is for similar reasons to Debian's use of Iceweasel name) and has been under development for quite some time. The AmigaBounty project page has screenshots and even more info for those interested. There's a video of the browser in action, but beware of the cheesy soundtrack.
No, no advantage.
It's still a very *efficient* OS, but it lacks about a zillion features that any modern OS has. Protected memory, for one.
But for day-to-day use? It's pointless and stupid. You can't do anything with AmigaOS that you can't do faster and better (anc cheaper- modern Amiga hardware is ridiculously expensive) on Linux, MacOS, or Windows.
Still, AmigaOS has a lot of neat features. It's still very well-designed, and it's interesting to think about what it would be like if it had sold well enough to become a viable alternative.
I care. Other /. members apparently care. Since you don't care, why did you waste your time posting a comment?
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it's interesting to think about what it would be like if it had sold well enough to become a viable alternative.
There is a good chance that it would look nothing like the OS we used on legacy Amiga hardware.
The reason the OS was so bloody fast was because it used a flat non-protected memory space. IPC was often done by passing pointers via registers. You could eavesdrop into any other task's memory space, even if its memory was not flagged with MEMF_PUBLIC. The majority of the kernel ran outside of 68K supervisor mode with function calls being made via a jump table as opposed to a software interrupt.
One of the largest complaints about desktop multitasking operating systems of the 80s and 90s was that they crashed too much. That was a huge complaint with Windows 95 and was also a common complaint with AmigaOS. To continue being a viable OS, AmigaOS would have needed memory protection bolted on at some point.
Using a fully virtualized protected memory model like UNIX and NT would have been incompatible with the foundation of AmigaOS since it would break IPC. You'd need stick with a flat address space, simply marking some memory sections as R/O. Program code sections could be R/O for everything except the kernel (that'd prohibit self-modifying code, but SMC was already incompatible with the data cache in 68020+ processors). Tasks could then allocate private memory, public memory or even semi-private memory by granting limited R/O or R/W access to other tasks.
Main problem I see with that route is that you'd bump into the 4GB barrier much faster than fully virtualized memory models, especially since a large chunk of that 4GB would also be allocated to memory mapped hardware and other PCI peripherals. You'd need a processor with a 48-bit or 64-bit memory address space sooner than later.
Last time I checked, you cant get a PC virus to run on a potato either.