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AmigaOS4 Update
by
Ben Hermans
Despite the unprecedented heatwave that ravaged
Europe, we made some significant progress in a number of
areas.
We now have comprehensive debugger support in OS 4
with the inclusion of an OS 4 native version of GDB, the state
of the art Linux debugging package (further info can be found
here). Thanks to the Reaction based Grim
Reaper module, much more useful information is available to
both developers and betatesters when an OS 4 native programs
crashes. This allows for more efficient debugging and more
accurate and informative bugreports.
To most of you this won't be news as we already
released a couple of screenshots showing the Grim Reaper and
GDB in action.
A lot of progress was also made on porting C based
68K OS modules to PPC. This work is now largely completed with
only one major area of concern, graphics.library and Picasso
96 something which we will tackle in the course of
September.
It is fair to say that nearly all OS modules which
were present in OS 3.1 (as a Kickstart module or diskbased
module) are now PPC native.
During September we also intend to tackle the
migration of higher level OS components such as AmiGS, AmiPDF,
Roadshow, Media Toolbox, Partition Wizard, SSL etc. which are
in effect not so much OS modules as OS 4 native applications.
As such, we do not anticipate any significant issues.
At the request of Mai Logic and its prospective
customers, both Hans-Joerg and Thomas Frieden have been
working on getting OS 4 to boot on the AmigaOne hardware.
Whilst this is commercially a very valid decision and we are
obviously satisfied with the interest of significant third
parties in Amiga OS 4, it is clear that this will somewhat
delay the Cyberstorm PPC version in favor of an earlier
release of the AmigaOne version.
As a result of these efforts, we now have a
hardware independent timer.device replacement which should
work on any PPC based hardware platform.
Significant progress is being made and we do
anticipate OS 4 to boot into Workbench on the AmigaOne
hardware by the end of September or early October.
More on this in next month's update.
Ben Hermans
Managing partner Hyperion
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