AmigaOS4 Update By
Ben Hermans
May 2003 was a month essentially dedicated to
weeding out bugs as we prepare for the "AmigaOS on Tour"
series of presentations, which will take place all over Europe
starting June 7.
We are now able to boot OS 4 from nearly
everywhere (onboard IDE, 4091 SCSI controller etc.) and we can
even start OS 4 from OS 3.x.
We have also been in contact with various third
parties about a "Kickstart 4.0" which could be located in a
suitable Flashrom.
This would not be mandatory for operation of OS
4.0 but would help those interested in cutting down on booting
times.
Stability has improved a lot and the system is now
running for long stretches of time.
We have implemented a mechanism which allows us to
transparently replace 68K libraries (like DOS for instance) by
a PPC version without there being a need to recompile the
program which calls this 68K library.
Complex applications like Roadshow (connected over
PPoE to an ADSL modem) in conjunction with Ibrowse 2.3 (which
uses MUI) running on a P96 RTG screen now work fine.
We were pleasantly surprised by the speed as with
nothing more than ExecSG as PPC native module and the rest of
the system running under emulation, the system felt like an
060/50 on the Cyberstorm PPC even though for compatibility
reasons we are using the interpretive emulation as opposed to
the (much faster but less compatible) JIT emulator (codename
"Petunia").
We then proceeded to test the unoptimized raw
interpretive emulation performance on a Cyberstorm PPC @ 200
MHz using Sam Jordan's Voxelspace demo in 320x240 8 bit on the
Voodoo 5. The 060 was at 50 MHz, 604 at 200 MHz. Results are
given from the initial screen, i.e. start the demo and read
the fps value.
060/50: 21 FPS EMU/200: 11.4 FPS
As you can see, the unoptimized interpretive 68K
emulation already reaches half the speed of an 060/50 on a
Cyberstorm PPC@200 Mhz.
This bodes very well when the rest of the system
is compiled for PPC, something that will progressively happen
during the OS 4 Tour.
It is also worth bearing in mind that the JIT
(Petunia) is magnitudes faster than the interpretive
emulation.
As all modules were extensively tested on 68K, any
problems running them under emulation point to bugs in the
emulation integration or inconsistencies between Exec and Exec
SG (often due to undocumented Exec behavior) which need to be
rooted out prior to migrating the modules to PPC.
On the module front, great progress was made on
one of the few outstanding issues, the SCSI driver for the
Cyberstorm onboard UW SCSI controller.
Forefront Technologies also informed us that the
Radeon P96 driver would soon be ready for beta-testing.
By the time you are reading this, the final
version of AmiPDF and AmiGhostscript should also have entered
beta testing.
In terms of added functionality (see the features
list we posted a few months ago) OS 4.0 is therefore as good
as completed and the main work in the upcoming weeks will
center around the actual system and migration of 68K modules
to PPC which should prove a painless process as all relevant
modules now compile with GCC and the build process has been
streamlined.
Ben Hermans Managing partner Hyperion
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