“Moonshots” Initiative to Secure the Future of RISC OS
riscosopen.org
riscosopen.org
32bit Arm is going away.
They are looking for the resources for a 64bit port.
That seems like an entirely reasonable ask. I don't know if enough people are interested but it seems entirely reasonable to ask.
At some point was updated to 32 bit, you can run it on a Raspberry Pi.
For code the limitation was baked into the architecture itself. The bottom two bits of the program counter were used to define the current execution mode (and always output as 0 to fetch word aligned instructions) while the top six bits were the status flag. That meant that saving the PC to the stack saved the whole execution context in a single memory write and it only took one read to restore it.
Fixing this required moving the flags to a separate register, which was a very visible change.
Unlikely for embedded.
Granted, some do not. Fujitsu's supercomputer comes to mind.
That's no doubt why this is a big issue for ROOL, as the pi is one of the main things they run on. Very few people would buy something just to run RiscOS so they need a relatively common platform.
VAX is a rather different beast than 32-bit ARM and that bandaid would result in a hybrid 32/64-bit operating system, but I wonder if a similar solution could be implemented for RISC OS.
So they have non of those. What’s the point then?
It just implies that they don't have sufficiently many of those.
> What’s the point then?
Well, to change this unsustainable situation. :-)
If there’s a good answer to that, sure build it, but Linux is incredibly flexible, powerful, honed, compatible and other things.
I see the romance in bringing a historic operating system into the future but without good reason there’s little point.
Starting with a "parallel universe" like RiscOS, FreeDOS, or the numerous Amiga-necromancy projects might make it easier to get to some clever idea that we wouldn't easily find starting from the assumptions modern Linux systems impose.