Amiga-Inspired AROS Goes Bare Metal on Raspberry Pi
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44061609
It's a remarkable little OS, and it does have potential. The Pi is a lovely little computer but a bit underpowered for modern Linux or FreeBSD, let alone Windows.
But as RISC OS on the Pi shows, it's got more than enough power to be a capable GUI desktop computer, and AROS could make it into one of the fastest Amigas ever.
While AROS also runs on x86 of course, including x86-64, that is a crowded market: AROS is a small fish in a big pond.
However, on a 1GB RISC machine, it could really shine as a fast, responsive, capable GUI OS, open to hacking and experimentation, and able to run pretty much any original Amiga software under emulation at much faster than Amiga speeds.
How much faster is the AROS kernel compared to Linux?
AROS is not AmigaOS, but it's a FOSS recreation of AmigaOS which started out on x86. It reached a usable level some years ago, and it's been used in some of the projects that have launched modern Arm-based hardware Amiga emulators, such as the THEA500:
https://retrogames.biz/products/thea500-mini/
And the A1200-NG:
https://www.a1200.com/index.php/the-a1200-ng/
Now it has reached some of those goals, the developers are branching out. In recent years, there have been...
• a Live USB key
• an x86-64-bit version
• an SMP version
And so on.
But bear in mind what AmigaOS is: This is an OS which appeared the decade before Linux (or NetBSD/FreeBSD).
Linux is a protected-mode 32-bit multiuser OS, which expects to run from a hard disk, and even when new really wanted a few MB of RAM. It has no native graphics, which is why today the X11 graphics system is being removed and replaced with a new one, Wayland.
AmigaOS is from the previous generation of computers. On the original Amiga 1000 it ran in 256 kB of RAM on a machine with only a single floppy drive. It really shone on a machine with 2-4 MB of RAM and twin 800kB floppies; a hard disk was an expensive luxury upgrade.
The core of Amiga OS was 3 tiny components:
• Exec, a minute (13 kB) message-passing kernel by Carl Sassenrath
• AmigaDOS, a port of TRIPOS, a message-passing multitasking single-user OS written in BCPL, the typeless ancestor of C, ported by the late Tim King -- I just wrote an obituary for him:
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/18/tim-king-ami...
• Intuition, a windowing library
All 3 fit on a single 800 kB floppy with room for apps.
This is an OS that's something like 1% to 10% of the size that Linux was in the early 1990s and which is focused on being a single-user multitasking GUI OS. No networking, no server functionality, no virtual memory, no hardware memory management, no memory protection (all processes in 1 memory space), but heavily optimised for raw performance.
Linux got usable when CD-ROM caught on: you needed a few hundred MB of space to fit the OS onto 1 distribution medium.
AmigaOS fit onto a few floppies: it needed a few MB.
This is a much smaller simpler OS. And yes it crashed, a lot.
But in 1985 it was the first ever multitasking OS for personal computers which let people do full-colour graphics, stereo sound, in multiple apps running at the same time... when the Mac supported 1- bit mono graphics at 384*256 pixels, and ran on a single 400 kB floppy.
AROS is not the same OS. It is more like a FOSS clone of what AmigaOS grew up into after 3 major releases, and modernised.
What I'm getting at is that this is not the same sort of beast as Linux or a BSD.
They are passenger cruisers which can take a few thousand people in great luxury across an ocean.
Minix or the GNU Hurd are a bus: a big transcontinental tour bus with a bathroom and a kitchenette.
AmigaOS is a bicycle.
I think the most impressive thing I ever saw on the Amiga was accidentally launching Wing Commander twice and having both instances just work, switching every couple of seconds or so. I very much doubt the dev ever tested that; why would they?
(BTW, I had uptimes of many hundred days with a regularly used Amiga machine. So crashes were possible, but if you run only quality software eventually (you'll eventually get to the point after a few years) it could be really, really stable. Eventually memory fragmentation would hit you though.)
I'm not disagreeing with your general points, just being pedantic about the "time bits".
Wayland has been the default for even enterprise distros since 2019, and Wayland was created in 2008, so not new, but newer than X11.
I don't know enough to even dispute the timing, so I will let it go.
But the core point here is that Linux has no kernel-integrated GUI, so it is possible to rip and replace it.
Whereas in the comments on my obit for Dr Tim King...
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/18/tim-king-ami...
... there are people discussing how it was impossible to completely disable the GUI in AmigaOS 1... it fired up with a CLI in a window because the windowing system is in the ROM. King used it to replace terminal sessions in TRIPOS, if I understand it correctly.
(I was using a Sinclair ZX Spectrum back then myself, and after a while on an Amstrad PCW, moved to an Acorn Archimedes. When AmigaOS 1.x was current, an Amiga cost as much as a small car in the UK, and I had just gone to university and could not afford a bicycle let alone a car.)
Although they were written by different teams, you could no more disable the Amiga's GUI than you could boot a Mac Plus into text mode: it didn't have a text mode to boot into. The GUI was an integral core part of the OS.
AmigaOS was better structured, with kernel, multitasking layer, and GUI layer... but they were still one inextricable whole.
This is the reverse of Unix, including Linux, which is a 1960s minicomputer OS design. Its inextricable core concepts are dumb terminals on serial ports, and a filesystem, and it barely has any built in idea of "networking" or "a GUI" -- they are bolted on extras that came a decade or 2 later.
You can boot any Linux into single-user mode with no networking and no GUI.
You can build Linux without ttys or serial ports. You can't disable VFS and a root fs (initramfs or noinitramfs, but either one is there), but Linux is surprisingly modular.
You can put DOS on a USB key and boot basically any 21st century x86 box straight into DOS.
I have a hobby project that does just that:
https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos
And yes, that includes UEFI boxes:
https://github.com/CSMWrap/CSMWrap
(No, I have not tried this myself yet. I own very few UEFI-only machines. I personally have no use for it.)
Hey!
I resemble that remark.
I haven't tried AROS in a while because I still treat it as a bit of a novelty and it's always a bit of a chore to set up a system for it. Raspi3 is cheap and easy to set up, might see what's the deal with it these days after all.