🚀 go-pugleaf

petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich) wrote:

>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.

Great; Now we have two LOSERS joint force. 
What does that equal.
       " EXTINCT"
Van

>	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
>Or ftp to ftp.netcom.com and go to /pub/pe/petrich