• MorphOS Developer
    bigfoot
    Posts: 510 from 2003/4/11
    Just quickly popping in to mention a few things...

    ... Boot-up speed is not indicative of general performance.

    It had up till now been running on some older AMD64 hardware at home that I could neither bring along nor repurchase, so I bought this brand new system and still needed to port the existing MorphOS-on-AMD64 to this newer hardware. I literally only finished the port to this specific hardware enough to boot to Ambient this morning while at the show, and the whole boot-up process is full of debug code and debug output that makes booting very slow.

    If you discount the relatively slow AMD64 BIOS startup, and the relatively slow network booting that I'm doing, then once the debug code and debug output is removed, the actual MorphOS bootup process is as fast as you'd expect it to be.

    ... This is not a finished product.

    It's more a demo of some components of a future MorphOS NG system, in particular the new kernel that will power it as well as the PowerPC emulation that will ensure compatibility with existing software. So for now it's just a fun demo, please don't interpret it as more than that.

    Let me just make this clear: This is basically a demo that's made up of components that are being developed with the goal of eventually reaching MorphOS NG. Not everything is there yet, but with what's there, it was possible to build this demo.

    ... AMD64 is a CPU architecture, not a specific CPU

    Just because this seems to cause confusion from time to time. AMD64 is the name of the 64 bit CPU architecture commonly used in PCs. GNU calls the same CPU architecture "x86_64" and Microsoft calls it "x64". Although this hardware is indeed AMD hardware, it's not necessarily tied to AMD.

    ... What is "native"? :D

    The kernel that powers this system is a new kernel written by yours truly. In the demo system on display here, it is (of course) running as 100% native AMD64 code and, yes, in 64 bit mode. The kernel also runs on both PPC32 and PPC64, and again as native 64 bit code on the latter.

    The current demo system - and may I remind you that this is just a demo - runs a mixture of native AMD64 code and existing PowerPC code.
    I rarely log in to MorphZone which means that I often miss private messages sent on here. If you wish to contact me, please email me at [username]@asgaard.morphos-team.net, where [username] is my username here on MorphZone.
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