28.Dec.2024
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Operating system for the Amiga: Third alpha version of "Serena OS"
At the end of 2022, we reported on the start of Dietmar Planitzer's project to write "Apollo", an experimental operating system for the Amiga 3000/4000. The developer has since renamed his project "Serena OS" (amiga-news.de reported) and released a third alpha version, which is available as a fully compiled ROM. Basically, all Amigas with a 68030 (or faster) processor are supported. The developer writes about the new version:
"The biggest change in this release is the introduction of the disk subsystem and significant improvements to the driver architecture. Booting off and working with double-density floppy disks is now supported.
The diskimage tool has also seen significant improvements: it now allows you to format an Amiga disk image (adf) with SerenaFS, list existing files, push files to a disk image, pull a file off a disk image, create directories, delete files, get and overwrite individual disk blocks and generate a diff of the disk blocks of two disk image files.
Thus you can now use the diskimage tool to create, list and manipulate SerenaFS formatted Amiga disk images on your host system.
Another significant enhancement is that Serena OS now supports a device filesystem (devfs). This filesystem is mounted at /System/Devices and lists all active drivers. An application may open a driver and use the read/write system calls to interact with it. Note however, that disk drivers are the only drivers in this release that actually support read/write operations from user space.
Serena OS implements a disk cache that caches data read from a (floppy) disk. Note that right now all writes are implemented as synchronous writes. The data is cached but the application is still forced to wait until the data has been written to disk. A future version will change this behavior such that an application will not have to wait for a write to finish.
Here is a more detailed list of changes since the previous release:
- more complete C library. Ie added qsort(), itoa() family of functions, etc
- many bug fixes across libc and the kernel
- a number of kernel optimizations
- significantly improved the reliability and performance of in-kernel dispatch queues
- worked out more details of the kernel driver architecture
- added support for disk drivers to the kernel
- added a disk cache to the kernel
- added a device filesystem to the kernel
- FileManager and FileHierarchy are now the kernel components that handle file operations and path resolution
- complete rework of the diskimage tool
- added support for building libtool, makerom and keymap on POSIX (Linux, macOS) systems
(dr)
[News message: 28. Dec. 2024, 06:52] [Comments: 0]
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