At 11:44 �� 7/2/2002 +0000, you wrote:
>On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Phoebus R. Dokos wrote: > >>ColdFire 68K architecture is indeed progressing but you are forgetting the >>power of the market as well... >>The embedded market (translation: Palm) wants Arm and that's where I think >>Motorola will move to... > >If using a Coldfire, there will be a need for code branches, and quite >simply, once you have one branch, that's 90% of the work of supporting an >entirely alien architecture. Well I am not sure exactly how much work it is (I am not an assembly programmer myself) but nonetheless that's exactly my point... If you do it.. do it right :-) >>A careful re-design based on a fusion of the three variants (QDOS Classic, >>Minerva and SMS) with the addition of a tightly embedded Media/Graphics >>API-GUI plus a uniform way to address the driver issue, will in the long >>run enhance the OS' size by only a few kilobytes (ok up to 512 Kb is >>considered a few nowadays) but it's still feasible... Compare this to any >>given Graphic/Media workstation using any of Windows/ UN*X/QNX/BeOS etc and >>you'll understand what I mean. > >I too see the future of the QL in a new QDOS-compatible OS written in C, >that can be cross-compiled for any processor. Exactly... Nice and neat a-la RiscOS but without the task-switching problems... >Some of these things are fairly open, but others can be very tied to >specific hardware implementations... True but that's why we will need to write only a small part in assembler each time. The driver API and the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer)... (Kinda like NT does it only that would work ;-) >A big challenge is the very specific way that interrupts are handled under >QDOS+ Yes but that's also tied to the M68K nature of things... A high-level Interrupt handler could universally deal with these problems... If you "unhook" the OS from the hardware (and I am not talking about exotic "exokernel" etc types of OSes but a basic abstraction) would lead to a lot more easier ways to develop software AND hardware... >I'm not the world's greatest programmer, but I've got several linux >servers, a risc (ARM) server and will soon have a QL hardware development >capability too. I'm open to supporting/facilitating a range of projects, >and would be happy to host any software development projects, from >applications coding, to a full, open-source attempt to code a QDOS+ >replacement in C. > >Of course, there's a lot to discuss first. I've been saying that for years now (As we Greeks say: there's hair on my tongue!) Phoebus
