🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <AWD6BEJU@news.uqam.ca>,
CLERMONT PASCALE <m210370@er.uqam.ca> wrote:
	[...]

>       Amiga Tech GmbH is forming a strategic alliance with Apple Computer,
>       since they have already been before wher eAmiga is going, from the
>       68k family of CPUs to the PPC.

	What's the deal here? I can see what Amiga Tech would want from 
Apple, but I'm not sure what Apple would get out of AT other than an ally 
in the great struggle against BillyBoySoft :-) Let's see...

Experience in going from Motorola 680x0 chips to PowerPC chips
An emulator of the 680x0 architecture that runs on PPC chips
Multimedia technologies -- QuickTime, etc.

	Also, AT announced that it plans to introduce virtual memory and 
memory protection to the AmigaOS; any hints on how it might do that? My 
speculation is that AT might have to make compromises similar to those 
Apple has made in System 8 (Copland):

All the interactive stuff and all the old stuff will live in a
compatibility-mode "Blue Box" (a term from one old MacWeek article). 
However, there can be server processes living outside of it in their own 
memory spaces, processes which can communicate with the interactive 
processes and each other.

A sort of cooperative multitasking will be maintained by setting only one
Blue-Box inhabitant runnable at a time, and switching when the MacOS would
now switch; unlike Win16 apps in Win95, they will be preemptively
multitasked with respect to everything else. However, the Amiga already
has preemptive multitasking, so this sort of setup will be unnecessary.

The Blue Box will have a single memory space, but allocated areas in it 
can be separated by unallocated areas, so that a running-off-the-edge 
error will generate a memory-access error rather than corrupt some other 
memory contents. Since the Amiga now has a single memory space, something 
like that may have to be done.

Virtual memory will always be on, even when there is enough physical 
memory; that will mean an end to the current hassles of memory 
partitioning in the MacOS, and I'm sure the AmigaOS. One will never have 
to worry about the RAM getting fragmented, since virtual->real mapping is 
fragmentation-proof.

Shared memory will be possible; all that is necessary to give some 
regions of different memory spaces the same backing-store objects. The 
AmigaOS features shared-memory "pools"; these should not be any trouble 
to implement in this fashion.

Code fragments and system stuff can be made read-only when running in 
user mode, only some critical OS stuff will run in supervisor mode, and 
will be privileged enough to change this stuff.

-- 
Loren Petrich				Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
My home page: ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/pe/petrich/home.html
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