Author Topic: Has anyone contemplated what a 64-bit OS/2 userland should look like?  (Read 6674 times)

A. Demetrious Sharpe, Sr.

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Pushing aside who'd do it, why they'd do it, or any reservations about kernels & drivers, what do you think a64-bit OS/2 userland would/should look like? Which userspace technologies would you expect it to have? What should it's desktop/GUI features be? Which features of OS/2 Warp 4 should be carried forward? Which features should be left behind? If it were tied to its hardware (the way OS X is tied to Apple's hardware), but it all just worked, would that be an issue?

Olafur Gunnlaugsson

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Re: Has anyone contemplated what a 64-bit OS/2 userland should look like?
« Reply #1 on: December 03, 2017, 08:04:28 pm »
Simplified OO WPS clone, no rendering engine as such but rendering offloaded to Vulcan, command line interface that is a hybrid of OS/2 CL and an interactive REXX interpreter, that would use Oberon style (much simpler) OO features glued onto REXX rather than the Smalltalk OO features that Objective REXX uses, but also offer AOS style "text interface inside a windowing environment" as an alternative for the CLI challenged. This could make the WPS feature of making everything an object pay dividends in making everything scriptable as well.

Merge the WPS "work folder" feature with the multiple desktop feature of eWPS to create a tabbed work folder that can also function as a separate virtual screen, and thus allows you to arrange your work into folder-tabs that each offers either a folder view or a desktop view or both.

Ditch the drive letter metaphor for an OO interface that works with NVMHCIS or similar, offer a plugin architecture that emulates drive letters for legacy software. Drive letters made sense in the 1970's, in 2017+ we should be using WPS objects with automatic configuration and management of storage, both local and networked.

Browser should be integrated into the WPS much like Web Explorer partly was, only more so. Some DOS compatibility on some level would be nice as well.

I would buy this ... either as software or hardware ... proprietary or not.

A. Demetrious Sharpe, Sr.

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Re: Has anyone contemplated what a 64-bit OS/2 userland should look like?
« Reply #2 on: December 03, 2017, 09:48:13 pm »
That’s a nice list. I won’t act as if I understood ALL of it, but I did understand MOST of it -& it seems like it may actually be feasible.

Martin Iturbide

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Re: Has anyone contemplated what a 64-bit OS/2 userland should look like?
« Reply #3 on: December 04, 2017, 01:14:22 am »
Hi Demetrious.

Just "dreaming in technicolor" here. If there will ever be a 64bit kernel it has to support the OS/2 apps.  For example the new 64bit kernel will have to trick the OS/2 components to make it believe that it is running under an OS/2 kernel. So you will grab all the OS/2's binaries components like PM, REXX, SOM, WPS and it will run over the new kernel, and as a consequence all OS/2 apps (that does not require access to drivers) will keep working.

I think that part of the requirement will be for the new 64bit kernel to trick, emulate or clone the behavior of the CPI (Control Program Interface) API, since that is the base API for OS/2. It looks to me that everything has to pass through the CPI to go to the kernel, with the exception of some components that calls directly specific drivers.

Regards

Martin Iturbide
OS2World NewsMaster
... just share the dream.

A. Demetrious Sharpe, Sr.

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Re: Has anyone contemplated what a 64-bit OS/2 userland should look like?
« Reply #4 on: December 04, 2017, 02:40:52 am »
Ok, but I’m not talking about the kernel. I’m asking what the user space components of OS/2 should look like for a 64 bit implementation the kernel is immaterial. At the end of the day, it’s the DLLs, and user space systems (e.g. SOM, WPS, etc.) that make the difference in whether applications will run or not. So, which userspace components would you like to see, if such a thing were possible?