OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Hardware
The last nail in OS/2's coffin
Lars:
Sorry, it's in German (unfortunately it's also not free):
https://www.heise.de/select/ct/2023/26/2317912025061981023
I suppose that this has also been.picked up by other IT press articles about the new X86-S architecture.
What it basically states is that Intel will now finally remove all 16-bit support (true for real mode, protected mode and VM86 mode), all segmentation, Ring 1 and 2 of the protection rings.
That means: NO OS/2 device driver will work, NO OS/2 1.x application will work, no application with an IOPL segment will work, no VDM will work, some parts of the kernel will cease to work.
OS/2 is going to be put to it's well deserved, permanent rest.
The current x86 will likely live on for a couple of years but there clearly is no future for OS/2, not even in a virtualization environment like Virtualbox.
Digi:
Time to pay attention to the project http://osfree.org/ :)
Martin Iturbide:
Hello
This is part of our 64bit dilemma.
I guess, reading some similar news articles, that Intel is trying to save costs and complexity on their processors by cutting the "legacy" of them. Intel calls it the "64-Bit Mode-Only Architecture". Yes, that will be the final nail in the coffin for running OS/2 on real hardware. I guess some emulators like 86Box can evolve to run ArcaOS at that time, but real hardware will be gone for us.
It's good to have the heads up about this, but the question is what we should do, as a community and as the little market that Arca Noae has. Is the answer to this question binary?
Option A: When the moment comes, let OS/2 and ArcaOS rest, switch to a different OS, and talk about the good old OS/2 times with our friends.
or
Option B: Try to do something and work in a different strategy for our community and software.
Option B will be the "Long Term Strategy" that I insisted on the past that we should have. The short term necessities are wifi drivers, more applications, translations, etc. But the long term strategy should be to finally "free / release" OS/2 from the IBM owned binaries.
My "Dreaming In Technicolor" idea will be to first (first step of several) having an approach to run OS/2 binaries over a 64bits kernel. Create a layer that can interpret OS/2 to keep running all the OS/2 experience like native applications, the PM and WPS (GUI), etc.
Ryan C Gordon, tried it with a different approach, try to interpret an OS/2 application over Linux. But it was too much work to clone all the OS/2 APIs in one shot.
The crazy/drunk idea will be to grab a 64bits open source multi-kernel and make OS/2 run interpreted (not emulated) from it. Like grabbing the Zircon kernel (from Fuchsia OS) and developing some layers of OS/2 interpretation over it for binaries, Kernel instructions and basic $Drivers. CPI, PM, WPS and native OS/2 apps think they are running over OS/2. (of course all OS/2 native drivers will be useless at that moment).
This will require a lot of knowledge on the OS/2 kernel and the Zircon kernel and a lot of effort too.
Reference:
- May 21, 2023. https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-proposes-x86s-a-64-bit-cpu-microarchitecture-that-does-away-with-legacy-16-bit-and-32-bit-support/
- 25 May 2023. https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/25/intel_proposes_dropping_16_bit_mode/
- Specification Proposal x86S - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/envisioning-future-simplified-architecture.html
Mentore:
--- Quote from: Lars on January 22, 2024, 12:05:09 am ---Sorry, it's in German (unfortunately it's also not free):
https://www.heise.de/select/ct/2023/26/2317912025061981023
I suppose that this has also been.picked up by other IT press articles about the new X86-S architecture.
What it basically states is that Intel will now finally remove all 16-bit support (true for real mode, protected mode and VM86 mode), all segmentation, Ring 1 and 2 of the protection rings.
That means: NO OS/2 device driver will work, NO OS/2 1.x application will work, no application with an IOPL segment will work, no VDM will work, some parts of the kernel will cease to work.
OS/2 is going to be put to it's well deserved, permanent rest.
The current x86 will likely live on for a couple of years but there clearly is no future for OS/2, not even in a virtualization environment like Virtualbox.
--- End quote ---
Dunno.
Basically this means we will build new machines on AMD CPUs.
(Jus' kidding, but not so much...)
Mentore
Lars:
Taken the fact that AMD was the driving force to intoduce 64-bit mode and Intel just following, I very much doubt that AMD would put the burden onto itself to support legacy HW concepts that no current OS needs. That would throw them behind Intel with no benefit at all. You need the die for modern stuff (AI in HW or some such, larger on-chip cache, larger SIMD registers etc.) and not for stuff that is not needed at all any more.
Intel taking that step is effectively Intel's confession that 16-bit and segmentation have no future at all.
As to the ring protection, it turned out that differentiating between "user" (Ring 3) and "system" (Ring 0) is already sufficient. For paging, these are already the only 2 "Ring Protection" levels (and they are consequently called "user" and "system").
Unfortunately, OS/2 offers use of Ring 2 (in conjunction with the IOPL flag in the EFLAGS register) to simplify I/O port access and therefore there are some applications that make use of that and would need to be rewritten to use a device driver instead. But see my statement about OS/2 device drivers ...
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