OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Internet
Arca Noae should be directly involved in web browser development efforts
Dave Yeo:
The other side is financing. I don't know much about Arca Noae's internals, not even sure of how many people are involved though I have a better idea then most here. They have to pay IBM some amount for every copy of AOS sold or given away. No idea of how much but I'd imagine IBM wants enough that the profit margin on AOS isn't that high. I don't think they have many enterprise customers and the number of users has been steadily dropping. I think it is as much hobby and side hustle for the owners and not something that they are getting rich on and I doubt they have the resources to pay for browser development besides supplying a bit of infrastructure and similar. I also don't think the community is big enough to support much either.
All the above is my opinion as I don't know much about the internals of Arca Noae.
Michael:
What might be a better option would be a kind of XP Mode, like in Windows 7. A lean and fast virtual environment for running a modern browser. And as if that weren't dreamy enough, perhaps even seamless on the WPS.
Dave Yeo:
--- Quote from: Michael on April 27, 2025, 06:15:41 am ---What might be a better option would be a kind of XP Mode, like in Windows 7. A lean and fast virtual environment for running a modern browser. And as if that weren't dreamy enough, perhaps even seamless on the WPS.
--- End quote ---
I don't know about a virtual machine. We do have Odin (think WINE). It hasn't been worked on in a while but you can run some Win32 programs, and can compile some Win32 programs to look native. In the past, Adobe Acrobat, OpenJDK for example have had their Win32 code recompiled on OS/2. Last time we went through this in the IE days, there was actually an official version of Opera built this way.
It would take syncing a recent version of WINE into Odin, probably a big job by skilled people, but a possibility.
Problem is that Win32 is going away. Less and less support it and I think Qt6 doesn't support it and not sure about others.
Michael:
I was thinking more along the lines of a lean Linux or BSD. And while I'm dreaming, I wanted it to run as a 64-bit system in the virtual environment and be able to use memory above the 4GB limit.
All of this is purely theoretical, of course, and without knowing whether it would even be technically possible.
Roderick Klein:
--- Quote from: Michael on April 27, 2025, 06:15:41 am ---What might be a better option would be a kind of XP Mode, like in Windows 7. A lean and fast virtual environment for running a modern browser. And as if that weren't dreamy enough, perhaps even seamless on the WPS.
--- End quote ---
It can work, however the big issue is that if you look how much memory the VM needs, plus the memory to run the OS + the browser. With the limited memory ArcaOS has it will pretty quickly run out of gas.
All discussions about PAE memory is sadly a big fat none starter. Idea's to make any program on OS/2 use PAE memory is a pipe dream. Now the current ArcaOS loader enables you to put a ramdrive in PAE memory. However the amount of addressable memory is not increased. The PAE code is extremely cool bit of codingin the ArcaOS loader. However it has a hidden cost in terms of performance. When you want to access memory above the 4 GB address range (for the ram drive) the loader effectively holds the CPU, switched CPU to PAE mode safe stack again and switch back. I am not describing it technically 100% accurate but PAE support via the UEFI loader has performance cost. There is BTW no other way to implement this.
Patch the OS/2 kernel to support PAE would possibly take about 6 to 12 months of full time. It would be a gigantic job. But then the drivers need to be updated for this.
I looked at this with Steve Levine years ago and its to much work that it will mostl likely never work.
One of the things that needs to be looked at is if the memory consumption of the QT webkit engine can be reduced. But this is currently under research. I will have more news on QT development. Tune into Warpstock Europe video stream, details on wwww.warpstock.eu.
Roderick
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