[comp.sys.amiga.advocacy] AmigaOS under UNIX

peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) (02/16/91)

In article <9569@uwm.edu> gblock@csd4.csd.uwm.edu writes:
> From article <1991Feb14.171425.6800@sugar.hackercorp.com>, by peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva):
> > Or how VPix runs MS-DOS programs (including Windows).

> But isn't that pretty buggy too?  From what I've heard, there isn't a whole
> hell of a lot you can run on that..

Well, I've loaded up an old copy of Microsoft Windows that I had running
around. That worked. Surprised the hell out of me. Not the current version,
though. Had tiled windows.

> Yeah... And I think a lot of people would be very disappointed in it if it
> didn't have that "instantaneous response" that so many amiga-users have grown
> to love (I being one of them)...

I suspect it'd be adequately fast for editors and the like, or CPU-intensive
stuff like raytracers and animation programs. I doubt you'd be able to run
BlazeMonger on it, though.

> (I cant think of the word
> for unix multitasking... it's something to do with tasks being different..)

Timesharing. Fairness is a higher priority than sub-millisecond response time,
since human reactions are normally in the 200 ms range.

> Okay, but could you run processes UNDER AmigaOS inside of AmigaOS and not
> affect the outside world?

Sure.

> And wouldn't this take gaping amounts of overhead?

Well, it'd probably suck a bunch of performance. Depends on what AmigaOS does
when there's no work for it to do... I believe it does a halt to give the
custom chips more of a share. Trap the illegal instruction and have it call
pause().
-- 
Peter da Silva.   `-_-'
<peter@sugar.hackercorp.com>.