5 ms·
“Moonshots” Initiative to Secure the Future of RISC OS
- andrewstuart 2y agoAny new operating system has to answer the question “why? what will this do that Linux can’t?”. If there’s a good answer to that, sure build it, but Linux is incredibly flexible, powerful, honed, compatible and other things. I see the romance in bringing a historic operating system into the future but without good reason there’s little point.
- hakfoo 2y agoOne aspect might be "avoiding getting stuck in local maxima". Starting with a "parallel universe" like RiscOS, FreeDOS, or the numerous Amiga-necromancy projects might make it easier to get to some clever idea that we wouldn't easily find starting from the assumptions modern Linux systems impose.
- forinti 2y agoI wish it could handle larger disks and had a decent browser.
- barabaka 2y agoROOL is seeking: * Funding partners * Experienced embedded software engineers * Community advocates So they have non of those. What’s the point then?
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago> So they have non of those. It just implies that they don't have sufficiently many of those. > What’s the point then? Well, to change this unsustainable situation. :-)
- ebiederm 2y agoThe situation RISC OS dates to the beginning of ARM and still lives but is 32bit only and in assembly. They have been getting sponsorship for small improvements. 32bit Arm is going away. They are looking for the resources for a 64bit port. That seems like an entirely reasonable ask. I don't know if enough people are interested but it seems entirely reasonable to ask.
- chasil 2y ago"32bit Arm is going away." Unlikely for embedded.
- ajb 2y agoIt's true in context. 32bit is going away for the class of device most people would run riscos on.
- chasil 2y agoAt the same time, many AArch64 implementations will run a 32-bit kernel. Granted, some do not. Fujitsu's supercomputer comes to mind.
- ajb 2y agoYeah. It turns out, even Arm's A76, which is what the raspberry pi 5 uses, doesn't support a 32 bit kernel: https://www.theregister.com/2018/05/31/arm_cortex_a76/ https://www.theregister.com/2018/05/31/arm_cortex_a76/ That's no doubt why this is a big issue for ROOL, as the pi is one of the main things they run on. Very few people would buy something just to run RiscOS so they need a relatively common platform.
- laurencerowe 2y agoThis seems totally reasonable but wasn’t the original problem that RiscOS was 26bit Arm?
- 2y ago
- boricj 2y agoWasn't OpenVMS stuck in a similar situation in the late 1980s, where they had tons of VAX MACRO assembly files they had to transpile to Alpha, then Itanium and nowadays x86_64? VAX is a rather different beast than 32-bit ARM and that bandaid would result in a hybrid 32/64-bit operating system, but I wonder if a similar solution could be implemented for RISC OS.
- andsoitis 2y agoAdditional context: https://www.riscosopen.org/content/documents/risc-os-moonshots https://www.riscosopen.org/content/documents/risc-os-moonsho...
- snvzz 2y agoFor RISC-OS's future, it'd make sense to invest on a RV64GC port.
- critiquebrowser 2y ago[dead]