| I wasn't really reasonable when I undertook the ATA project. I think
| this project, if run collectively, can be reasonable. Or rather, I
| think this is the most reasonable future of the platform. Rewriting
| NewtonOS, rebuilding hardware are much more complex directions.
Paul, I'm totally fascinated by your idea. I think it's definitely a more
direct and maybe straight-forward way than trying to rewrite every single
aspect of the NewtonOS and thus creating a new OS that in the end will be
anything but compatible to the NewtonOS as we know it, if a certain point is
reached. Also, keep in mind, that extending GNUton will take more man-hours
to get to this certain point and maybe is more complex than trying to figure
out, how the low-level P-Class stuff works and trying to implement something
that acts in a similar way as the "Newton's heart" does. Think of it as
cutting off the roots of the NewtOS (that is the hardware layer) and
reimplementing a new base.
If I only knew more about hacking the NewtonOS and its internals and had
more time, I would definitely be willing to help with this project!
Paul, another thing I noticed somewhere: Wasn't there a preliminary
unfinished support for 16/24/32 bpp graphics in NewtOS 2.1?
Another thing that I think could cause headaches is the endianess problem,
if a big endian emulator needs to be written. I thought that all newer
StrongARM CPUs still feature support for both big and little endian
operation mode. Wouldn't this make the endianess wrapper obsolete?
Another point would be: How to implement the drivers? Using a minimal
embedded Linux Kernel as low-level OS to wrap system calls coming from the
PlatformDriver interface to the devices using some sort of "glue-code"? I
think this would add additional overhead not really needed and would
possibly sacrifice performance and memory usage. Porting existing drivers
from Linux/NetBSD et al. to this new structure would make more sense to keep
memory usage as low as possible, though this will also add additional amount
of time.
Just my foolish thoughts....
Regards,
Andre Beckedorf
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