#PC Mag => Amiga Letter?
4 messages in this thread
Paul,
>> Warp is actually pretty terrific. But it's handicapped by (a) having to
include all kinds of Windoze compatability, and (b) having to work on SO many
different hardware configurations.
And it is very handicapped by its device driver design, which is 16-Bit only
and NOT preemptive multitasking. I am VERY disappointed. Well, I am in device
driver business, so this hurts me a lot! On this level Windows NT is just the
best I have ever seen. Even old Windows 3.1 is a real, 32-Bit preemptive
multitasking Kernel on this level, so playing with Warp which is advertised as
a 32-Bit OS was really a shock! Sigh.
Oliver
Oliver,
as you're mentioning 'Kernel' – what actually is a Kernel, and what's a
'microkernel based operation system' (like NT or most Unix OSs)? Is AmigaOS?
Cheers,
// Christian "ELP" Busse
\X/ near Frankfurt, Germany
Christian
A micro-kernal OS is what it sounds like: a very small fast core of the
most basic instructions. Based on this is a sort of highlevel language
instruction set in which the more complex OS functions are written.
A classic example is the Forth language, which is also it's own OS. The
kernal is a very small threaded language and the higher level instructions
are based on this set of threaded calls…which can be added to as needed
by using a built in machine language compiler. So even the kernal is not
"frozen" like most such systems, it can grow and create it's own
instruction sets. I find it quite fascinating and it has been used to
write several AI systems. For the Amiga it is called Jforth Professional,
by the way, and there were some other versions.
Unix really can't claim to be that elegant in my opinion, there are no
examples of simple unix systems that can be run from a small embedded
controller's 512K ROM, for instance. I would not expect NT could do that
either. But I may be wrong here since I don't program in either.
Hope that wasn't more than you wanted to hear.
Tom
alternate: jonest@hfsi.com
I never met a man I didn't like…Will Rogers
A Kernal is the main control portion of an Operating System. It has defined
protocol to other variable and replaceable OS elements such as device drivers.
The Kernal is usually 'configurable' ala Unix. That is, it is possible to
'rebuild' the kernal for specific features and to some extent behaviour. The
'rebuild' will vary among systems using a Kernal but basically a portion is
usually recompiled and relinked to the core of the kernal (the core not being
recompiled).
AmigaOS is not a kernal based system but many of the features that prompted the
kernal design are enabled in AmigaOS dynamically.
-bill