Submitted by Drobe has scored evidence that Jeffrey Lee, with help from Uwe Kall and ROOL staff, have managed to port RISC OS 5 to the Beagleboard, a board with a 600Mhz Cortex A8 ARM processor and 256MB of RAM. Drobe has a photo of RISC OS 5 booting into a command prompt.
The operating system is able to drive a monitor through DVI and can talk with the rest of the world through a serial port. Lee explained that his next move is to get USB up and running for keyboard and mouse support.
This port makes a few things clear. First of all, it means that RISC OS 5 can be ported using the code of the RISC OS Open project without a massive team of engineers to back it up. It also means that RISC OS 5 can run on the Cortex A8 family of ARM processors, which will be the type of processors found in the upcoming avalanche of ARM-powered netbooks.
Lee told Drobe:
Regarding the status of the port, the kernel and critical HAL components (such as the interrupts, timers and serial IO) are the only real things that are working apart from the video code.Once all the hardware drivers are working there’ll still be plenty of work to do to improve their functionality, and to update the kernel and other software to make use of the new CPU features – the most notable features are likely to be the VFPU and an API to allow use of the spare hardware YUV overlay.
Let’s hope that the fruit of this labour will allow us to run RISC OS on cheap ARM devices, such as the upcoming netbooks, because like the Amiga, RISC OS is too intriguing a platform to just lay there unused, only experienced through stories on OSAlert.
RISC OS is a cool little OS with some interesting available software. To see it within striking distance of being fully operational on hardware that is both cheaper and more powerful than anything ever made available before is amazing. All hail the power of Open Source!
I don’t really know RISC OS or why anyone would want to run it, but its still a pretty awesome example of open source. If it wants to be an option, this is a good first step.
Stable operating system with a small footprint, quick bootup/shutdown times. Intiative UI.
I think you mean “intuitive”. Those features aren’t that rare these days.
It is nice to see RISC OS moving in a future friendly direction. good work guys, keep it up.
Even though I’ve never used RiscOS myself I’m well aware of its cult following, especially over in Europe, so this is great news for many I’m sure. I recall looking at those Ionix made RiscOS machines awhile ago and they were $600+, and came in a shuttle-style case — big and expensive.
Before Christmas of this year, we’re going to have a handful of ARM Cortex-A8-based netbooks, and even a few nettops (which are about the size of a deck of playing cards) which will be based on the likes of the Omap3530 (production at 600Mhz, sampling at 800Mhz and higher) and the i.MX 515 (which runs around 1Ghz) — both have 3D acceleration and many other features.
ARM has been on the rise somewhat quietly gaining ground within the mobile space, and the combination of faster, more integrated ARM chips and the popularity of low-powered x86 chips like Atom have created a situation where ARM can compete on performance while offering benefits in terms of cost, power consumption, and level of integration.
The x86 strategy has been to develop for high-powered system and let the x86 technology trickle down to low-end devices. ARM has been slowly, but steadily, moving upwards from the low end devices. In the near term I think we’re going to see a lot of overlap in the low end of the “PC” market — nettops and netbooks, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, eventually, ARM becomes a more-potent architecture capable of competing in higher-end, traditionally “PC” devices — I imagine the desktop will be the last to be infiltrated but, if the worthiness of ARM is proven in nettops and netbooks, that ARM processors will later move into what could be considered “real” laptops and devices such as media center PCs within 5 years.
ARM already has a base in consumer devices the likes of which PowerPC, Alpha, MIPS or Sparc could only dream of (even as good a run as Power had in the Macs). No one is begging the ARM suppliers to develop this new hardware in the way that Apple had to beg IBM for new PowerPC chips suitable for consumer use — its happening as a natural course of evolution, and ARM is actually interested in being in that space.
ARM is now the second most-supported architecture among Linux distributions and open software. Flash is coming to ARM this year — the last piece of the “full internet experience.”
ARM does indeed have a long way to go to match x86 on high-end performance, but we’re now starting to see multi-core, super-scaler ARM architectures (Cortex A9) which will really set the foundation for ARM performance to accelerate more rapidly than it has to this point.
I believe very strongly that we’re seeing the coming-of-age of an architecture that will become the most significant competition x86 has ever seen — One which may stand toe-to-toe with x86 before our lifetimes are through.
ARM was born on the high end. The Acorn RISC machines blew everything else available at the price (and even well above their price) out of the water when introduced in 1987. Sadly after Acorn stopped making computers, there was no need for a a high end desktop/workstation RISC variant, so progress basically stopped. Now as cellphones and PDAs need more and more horsepower, development of high-performance ARM parts seems to have started up again.
Uh, my Nokia n800 with OS 2008 would like a word with you.
Seriously, it may perhaps have Flash that can’t handle some kind of heavy/slow content, or fail to meet some ‘available for other ARM-based hardware and not in a binary blob’ open source condition, but it exists today.
Hate Flash (slow/buggy/closed source/used for media DRM). Hate Silverlight more (same as above, plus fewer CPU architectures (Flash has a OS X PowerPC variant, Silverlight 2.0 is now OS X Intel only) and Microsoft baggage).