Amiga-Inspired AROS Goes Bare Metal on Raspberry Pi
hackaday.com47 points by mdp2021 6 hours ago
47 points by mdp2021 6 hours ago
I am watching this with some interest -- I wrote about AROS myself last year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44061609
It's a remarkable little OS, and it does have potential. The Pi is a lovely little computer but a bit underpowered for modern Linux or FreeBSD, let alone Windows.
But as RISC OS on the Pi shows, it's got more than enough power to be a capable GUI desktop computer, and AROS could make it into one of the fastest Amigas ever.
While AROS also runs on x86 of course, including x86-64, that is a crowded market: AROS is a small fish in a big pond.
However, on a 1GB RISC machine, it could really shine as a fast, responsive, capable GUI OS, open to hacking and experimentation, and able to run pretty much any original Amiga software under emulation at much faster than Amiga speeds.
How much of the speedup is due to a different user space vs Linux (the kernel)?
How much faster is the AROS kernel compared to Linux?
It's hard to measure.
AROS is not AmigaOS, but it's a FOSS recreation of AmigaOS which started out on x86. It reached a usable level some years ago, and it's been used in some of the projects that have launched modern Arm-based hardware Amiga emulators, such as the THEA500:
https://retrogames.biz/products/thea500-mini/
And the A1200-NG:
https://www.a1200.com/index.php/the-a1200-ng/
Now it has reached some of those goals, the developers are branching out. In recent years, there have been...
• a Live USB key
• an x86-64-bit version
• an SMP version
And so on.
But bear in mind what AmigaOS is: This is an OS which appeared the decade before Linux (or NetBSD/FreeBSD).
Linux is a protected-mode 32-bit multiuser OS, which expects to run from a hard disk, and even when new really wanted a few MB of RAM. It has no native graphics, which is why today the X11 graphics system is being removed and replaced with a new one, Wayland.
AmigaOS is from the previous generation of computers. On the original Amiga 1000 it ran in 256 kB of RAM on a machine with only a single floppy drive. It really shone on a machine with 2-4 MB of RAM and twin 800kB floppies; a hard disk was an expensive luxury upgrade.
The core of Amiga OS was 3 tiny components:
• Exec, a minute (13 kB) message-passing kernel by Carl Sassenrath
• AmigaDOS, a port of TRIPOS, a message-passing multitasking single-user OS written in BCPL, the typeless ancestor of C, ported by the late Tim King -- I just wrote an obituary for him:
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/18/tim-king-ami...
• Intuition, a windowing library
All 3 fit on a single 800 kB floppy with room for apps.
This is an OS that's something like 1% to 10% of the size that Linux was in the early 1990s and which is focused on being a single-user multitasking GUI OS. No networking, no server functionality, no virtual memory, no hardware memory management, no memory protection (all processes in 1 memory space), but heavily optimised for raw performance.
Linux got usable when CD-ROM caught on: you needed a few hundred MB of space to fit the OS onto 1 distribution medium.
AmigaOS fit onto a few floppies: it needed a few MB.
This is a much smaller simpler OS. And yes it crashed, a lot.
But in 1985 it was the first ever multitasking OS for personal computers which let people do full-colour graphics, stereo sound, in multiple apps running at the same time... when the Mac supported 1- bit mono graphics at 384*256 pixels, and ran on a single 400 kB floppy.
AROS is not the same OS. It is more like a FOSS clone of what AmigaOS grew up into after 3 major releases, and modernised.
What I'm getting at is that this is not the same sort of beast as Linux or a BSD.
They are passenger cruisers which can take a few thousand people in great luxury across an ocean.
Minix or the GNU Hurd are a bus: a big transcontinental tour bus with a bathroom and a kitchenette.
AmigaOS is a bicycle.
> no native graphics, which is why today the X11 graphics system is being removed and replaced with a new one, Wayland.
I'm not disagreeing with your general points, just being pedantic about the "time bits".
Wayland has been the default for even enterprise distros since 2019, and Wayland was created in 2008, so not new, but newer than X11.
You mean that if I experience a call of nature with AROS I have to stop, dismount, and go behind a tree? :)
(BTW, I had uptimes of many hundred days with a regularly used Amiga machine. So crashes were possible, but if you run only quality software eventually (you'll eventually get to the point after a few years) it could be really, really stable. Eventually memory fragmentation would hit you though.)
> the first ever multitasking OS for personal computers which let people do full-colour graphics, stereo sound, in multiple apps running at the same time
I think the most impressive thing I ever saw on the Amiga was accidentally launching Wing Commander twice and having both instances just work, switching every couple of seconds or so. I very much doubt the dev ever tested that; why would they?