OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Hardware
The last nail in OS/2's coffin
Dave Yeo:
In theory, you could have a 286 emulator in ring -1 along with a program to take control when there was an illegal instruction trap and emulate the 16 bit instructions. Ring -1 is for hypervisors and such. The missing ring 2 and IOPL flag would be harder if even possible.
Not going to happen with the shortage of developers. Besides, in this 64bit world, hardware manufacturers no longer care about the lower 4GB's so what is happening, fractured memory leaving too little visible to 32 bit applications and the killer, the framebuffer being mapped above 4GB.
One thing is hardware lasts now, I just retired a 13 year old machine that was still running fine, just slow IO and a crappy EUFI. So there's another decade where OS/2 will run on older hardware. I doubt that I'll be around that long.
JTA:
There are two ways to run OS/2, better than it runs on hardware (which does have its limitations) ... the first is virtualization (Virtualbox), and the second is emulation (QEMU).
WRT virtualization (and OS/2), it allows things to be used long after most folks can't figure out how to keep using them on existing hardware ... their hardware dies, and they just stop using the old stuff. By virtualizing, the old stuff pretty much runs forever ... implement virtualization, perhaps by the AToF methods in the virtualization sub-forum, and OS/2 will run many, many years past the point where folks have stopped using OS/2 on "old" hardware.
WRT QEMU, it emulates the processor(s) that OS/2 ran on, and given a reasonable platform, you probably couldn't tell that OS/2 was being emulated.
I'd believe that both of these methods, and others that I haven't explored yet, will keep OS/2 running long past the point of current "old" hardware methods.
Given the popularity of all things "vintage", I'd also believe that OS/2 will be running such that the baton will be handed off to many more "generations" of OS/2 users.
I'm not sure we've seen all that virtualization & emulation has to give us ...
Martin Iturbide:
--- Quote from: Neil Waldhauer on January 22, 2024, 03:33:16 pm ---The other thing that threatens OS/2 is the aging of its users. I predict that will be the actual cause of death.
--- End quote ---
I'm scared to interpret this like my age group (40's) is going to be last one using OS/2 ;)
Let's try to get people on his 30's to the community !!! ;D
Regards
Digi:
--- Quote from: Martin Iturbide on January 22, 2024, 03:19:40 am ---The crazy/drunk idea will be to grab a 64bits open source multi-kernel and make OS/2 run interpreted (not emulated) from it.
--- End quote ---
http://osfree.org/ - The beginning has already been made. As I understand it, most of the Dos* functions have already been implemented.
Roderick Klein:
--- Quote from: Lars on January 22, 2024, 02:28:43 pm ---If you want to delve into the details:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/envisioning-future-simplified-architecture.html
Currently, this is only a proposal. But it gives a very good idea of what Intel thinks is no longer needed.
--- End quote ---
Its expected this will indeed be long term thing to happen. I understand the legacy bit takes up 12% of the space in CPU.
I read an article (I do not the have link handy) of one of the main AMD tech engineers and he said the proposal was every interesting.
However the engineer indicated the changes proposed are "very, very, very, very complex to make".
The other thing that this would imply is (the way I understand it) is that NO current VM would work anymore
to run legacy OS. Its the CPU that provides the virtualization support to hypervisor.
Roderick
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