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AmigaOS4 Update
By
Ben Hermans
Another month, another status report on OS 4 and
quite a month it has been too.
The current state of AmigaOS 4 was shown to
audiences in France, Italy, the U.S. and Canada and was
greeted with enthusiasm by those that attended the various
events.
I want to thank the organizers of these events for
their commitment and all of you who took the time to attend
these events or went to the trouble of reading up on the
material we have put out there.
Special thanks must go to Dr. Ray Zarling,
professor of computer science at the California State
University, for his glowing endorsement of the AmigaOS 4
project and kindly taking over two OS 4 presentations at
Amiwest.
Ray is a true Amiga fan and living proof of the
fact that we are on the right track.
For those that could not be there, my Amiwest
presentation slides are available on Amiga.com in various
formats.
Those of you who took the time to compare between
the presentation we did in France and the one in California
will have noticed that in the meanwhile we have converted
another bunch of OS modules to PPC.
We estimate that we have now completed 50% of the
migration work (not in terms of converted modules but in terms
of actual workload).
We expect the pace to pick up further as we head
into August.
There are several reasons for this.
First of all, we have now thoroughly debugged the
source-code conversion tools and fine-tuned include files,
compilers and porting procedure. Quite a bit of time was
wasted dealing with issues that popped up during the
conversion of complex modules such as Intuition.
Secondly, we simply have a lot more experience now
porting OS modules to PPC. Our OS 4 developers are clearly
getting the hang of it.
Thirdly, most issues we encountered whilst porting
OS modules are due to interaction between 68K and PPC modules.
As more and more OS modules are available in PPC native
format, this type of problem occurs ever less frequently.
The biggest chunk of the remaining work centers
around graphics.library and Picasso96, which we want to offer
as substantially PPC native modules.
This entails conversion of 68K ASM code to either
PPC ASM or C depending on the case.
We implemented the loading of ELF binaries (the
new OS 4 binary format) as a shared library, which will allow
us to provide Segtracker like functionality for the
developers. They will be able to pinpoint the exact
source-code line where a program crashed and its stack
frame.
All of this is just an intermediate solution for
the real boon: full GDB support integrated in OS 4, something
on which we are working very hard.
GDB is one of the most sophisticated debugging
environments on any platform.
GDB can do four main kinds of things (plus other
things in support of these) to help you catch bugs in the act:
- Start your program, specifying anything that might
affect its behavior.
- Make your program stop on specified conditions.
- Examine what has happened, when your program has
stopped.
- Change things in your program; so you can experiment
with correcting the effects of one bug and go on to learn
about another.
Further information about GDB can be found on
http://sources.redhat.com/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb_toc.html.
When a task crashed on OS 4, a special Reaper task
is activated which presents you with the option of suspending,
killing and debugging the crashed task.
It is at this point that GDB can be attached to
the crashed task with the possibility of restarting the
crashed task with full debugger support.
This is truly revolutionary for the Amiga platform
and will be a great help for everybody developing software for
the Amiga.
In the meanwhile we have two new additions to our
family of OS 4 compilers: Frank Wille produced an OS 4 native
version of the well-liked VBCC compiler and we now also have a
Windows hosted OS 4 cross-compiler.
This is an exciting time for all of us in the OS 4
development team as we see the OS take form right in front of
our eyes on a daily basis.
See you next month for another update.
Ben Hermans
Managing partner Hyperion
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