New multi-core kernel for AmigaOS 4 shown at Pianeta Amiga!

I'm actually staggered no one is talking about this, but Andrea Palmaté, of AmigaLabs fame, has developed an ExecSG interface-compatible kernel for AmigaOS that supports multiple cores -- and it was actually shown running at Pianeta Amiga this weekend. It's apparently partially based on AROS source code.

So far it runs on the SAM460ex and X5000 platforms. Additionally ACube showed a new T2080-based motherboard, a brand-new NVMe driver, and a brand-new graphics driver supporting Radeon RX cards among many others. An article with details is available here:

https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/2026/ ... nveiled-at-pianeta-amiga/

This is all potentially huge news compared with such little (publicly acknowledged) progress on the platform until recently. With USB audio AHI drivers, a full MESA stack, new games and game ports, and even a new word processor, we're seeing activity in the past few months we haven't in a long time.

Kudos to everyone who have been plugging along, pushing AmigaOS forward bit by bit. It's appreciated!

-- eliyahu

Oh, and how long will it take for this new kernel clone to match the existing functionality—and, above all, to work correctly without causing compatibility issues with a kernel that has already been running for 22 years? After the failure of Warp3D Nova and the looming obsolescence of Hans's work on 2D drivers, this looks to me like yet another piecemeal fragmentation of a system that is becoming increasingly difficult to keep together

Holy cow, man. This year things have really come alive again on so many fronts.

@eliyahu

Great news but dammit us X1000 better get multi-core too man

Kudos to ACube on another PPC motherboard

@samo
It's already match almost all exiting functionality. But, among simple supporting more cores, it will support more important thing (yes,more important that more cores) : TLS. In current version of kernel/elf.library we forced to use emuTLS in the gcc , mean many, many things slower much in games and apps. For my ports and for MESA i had to rewrite it all together to use my own fast TLS, which still, not that fast as proper kernel's TLS should be.

Ask yourself, how long it will take that ExecSG team will add TLS ? You know the answer (never, probably).

And, you have no needs to be fragmented. You simple choose what you want to use, want to use AEON's drivers : no problems, you use them, want other ones, no problems too, use them. Choose is good. Same for kernel, you want it : you use another kernel, don't want : use official one.

The same as everywhere in whole world. You just not limited anymore to wait years.

More of it, with current state, Hyperion even can't include AEON's RadeonRX drivers with OS4.2 , now, with Acube they surely will have better ability to dealt with. At least, to have maybe some free basic version to able to run.

I wish there will be a day when we will have opensource CFE for x1000 and Uboot for x5k, so we will be no forced to live with bugs for years anymore.

@kas13

Sure you may be right and i know the crap situation, but honestly I fail to see any major advantages on this choice... what is the difference between this approach and what Matthew did before by replacing operating system components with others bearing the same damn name, creating in end a mess of incompatibilities, confusion and new bugs?
Perhaps simply because the earlier components from him were proprietary, whereas these one are now an open-source solutions?
Well, at that point, it would be better to just make the entire operating system as open source, or (God forbid) rewrite everything opened from scratch

@samo79

There Is a big difference between my work and AEON one. My kernel will be open source. So one day if I don't want to work anymore on it, anyone can continue. And anyone can contribuite to it.

This is something people don't understand. Warp3D, opengles and all closed source libraries could be fixed and improved easily if anyone could work on them. But since in amigaland we are in 1980 anything is closed and nothing of this is possibile.

@samo
Quote:

What Andrea said: it will be open, and no one can stop you or anyone else from fixing bugs.

But again, that only as another choose, no one will block anyone from using ExecSG's kernel. As well as no one will block Hyperion to simple use this kernel instead of ExecSG's one if they will have such a wish.

@afxgroup
Honestly, I can't wait to try it.
Thanks, Andrea, and to everyone involved in the project.

I imagine this kernel will be available on OS4Depot?

Are there photos or videos of the event?

Great news, we are living in interesting times!

@kas1e

I agree with you, Roman! You are absolutely right!!!

@afxgroup

Sincere words—none truer; this was an approach that should have been taken years ago... we might still have had a chance to use a modern system...

@afxgroup
nice project and very interesting. thank you very much!

@kikems

yes, has soon as I have time to put things together and edit the videos. Please be patient as I'm very busy at the moment.

@Lecta

Thank you, and sorry for the impatience; I think we’re all very excited about the latest news. :)

I think its good news, it’s a shame of cause, if we have to drop support for 68K software, the JIT compiler and so on, but maybe compatibility layer can be built on top instead, if that becomes the case..

AmigaOS4.1 FE behave really nicely, I get impression that this Kernel replacement, might effect intuition as well, it looks different in screenshot, if so I hope really we can get official OS4.1 intuition support for this kernel.

I’m not sure this fully solved complicated owner ship of AmigaOS4.1 where some things are made by AEON, and ExecSG team, and other parts being made by Hyperion, but it might make things easier. I hope.

@kikems

See the link in the first post, I've added it again here.

https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/2026/ ... nveiled-at-pianeta-amiga/

@Everyone

I'm sorry for hotrod's behavior in this thread. Just keep ignoring those comments as you have so far and we'll try to keep the thread clean.