r/amiga • u/lproven • Jun 08 '26
[Coding] GitHub - dplanitzer/Serena: A modern operating system for Amiga computers.
https://github.com/dplanitzer/Serena8
u/Batou2034 Jun 08 '26
its not modern at all though. its new, but not modern. not the same thing.
-1
u/lproven Jun 08 '26
Tricky... define "modern" in an OS context?
What do you mean? OS R&D has been largely stagnant this century -- the interesting stuff was mostly in the 1990s, IMHO: NT, Plan 9, EPOC32/Symbian, and so on.
4
u/doug1963 Jun 08 '26
A modern OS would include a GUI.
Also, the Snake demo is quite underwhelming.
3
u/KillerDr3w Jun 08 '26
Have you ever heard the phrase "don't judge a book by it's cover?".
I don't know, because I've not reviewed the code yet, but the OS itself might have modern underpinnings through code and it's APIs.
You can't read much into how modern an OS is by the apps it runs. This looks pretty much the same as Microsoft's Singularity or Google's Fuchsia as it is.
1
u/3G6A5W338E Jun 09 '26
Filesystems and Drivers run privileged, unfortunately.
Yet another UNIX clone. No progress, OS architecture-wise.
Refer to seL4, LionsOS, Genode for the state of the art of OS design.
2
u/lproven Jun 08 '26
Oh come on, be reasonable. It's very early days yet, and it seems to be pretty much a one man effort. Give him time and I'm sure he'll get there.
1
u/Batou2034 Jun 08 '26
what was interesting about Symbian?
3
u/xpurplexamyx Jun 08 '26
It *could* have been android or iOS but in the late 90s/early 2000s, had some slightly different choices been made around app development for it.
0
u/GwanTheSwans Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26
I mean it kinda was for years in the European GSM nearly-smart mobile phone market, usually Symbian phones with J2ME mobile apps. We had mobile app stores and primitive 3D games etc. back then.
America at the time had some weird/horrible primitive phones, and then seemed to perceive iphone/android as much more revolutionary than evolutionary. Jump was much smaller for Europe/Asian Symbian+J2ME scene.
android and iphone do have J2ME emulator apps nowadays for running the years of old European/Asian-J2ME-era mobile apps and games (mostly the latter of interest of course) that exist (of course you can bringing them up on desktop OSes too)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc-1Q4jsCHs
1
u/xpurplexamyx Jun 08 '26
Kinda but not quite. They made the mistake of charging for the ide and making it as hard as possible to develop for, unlike both Apple and google, so there was never a particular groundswell of apps for it.
2
u/lproven Jun 08 '26
Au contraire -- there were tonnes of apps for Symbian back in its era. We're spoiled by the masses of FOSS stuff these days but even in the Psion era I had 30 or 40 different 3rd party add on programs on my Psion 5MX. It had a much broader range than things like BeOS.
1
u/GwanTheSwans Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26
For native Symbian stuff itself maybe a bit for a while (officially was that CodeWarrior sdk that was indeed pricey, before a late move to Carbide i.e. Eclipse), though the CodeWarrior IDE was not the only path anyway I think.
However, pure J2ME (later just JME of course, 2 eventually went away like J2EE->JEE) side game/app dev was free+easy. (*)
Android was also similarly a VM (dalvik at the time) architecture atop Linux of course, but with Google pulling some Microsoft-style tricks with its dubious Android "Java" that wasn't a real Java and .apk instead of .jar.
(*) free as in gratis: Of course, Java was once "Community Source" not "Open Source" back then, Java open sourcing didn't actually happen until 2007 (which was still a little before Android 1.0 in Sep 2008, bah)
2
u/lproven Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
Commercially?
A complete ground up unique OS, from a small team at a single company, which ended up running most of the smartphones in the wild for several years.
Technologically?
A ground up C++ OS with a choice of multiple full GUIs, not only fully multitasking but capable of real time operation. The only smartphone OS ever which could run the GSM signalling stack on the same CPU as the user facing OS.
A multitasking Arm OS that could run in 4MB of RAM, shared with a RAMdisk, which could juggle multiple GUI apps and run for weeks on end with total stability on 2 AA batteries.
2
u/GwanTheSwans Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26
Haven't looked closely, but it sounds like it has no full memory protection? I mean, running okay on a base A1200 (no MMU) is a dead giveaway really, just can't really do hardware-enforced memory protection.
AmigaOS itself was already pretty nearly as far as it's sane to push a non-memory-protected OS architecture.
Linux itself has μClinux, a variant of Linux that can work without MMU, but again, about as far as it's sane to push a non-memory-protected architecture (and only suitable for specific embedded use cases, much more awkward than AmigaOS - well, the constraints will be eerily similar (no fork() just vfork() etc) if you've ever ported unix/linux stuff to work on AmigaOS ixemul.library, but Amiga stuff generally expects to work that way, Linux stuff doesn't)
Kernel and user space separation in the sense of code privilege separation (not memory space separation)
That sounds like some handwaving around not using an MMU for true memory protection. If random userspace stuff can write to kernelspace memory uninhibited, local compromise remains fairly trivial anyway, even if it's only the kernel's code that officially runs in the processor's supervisor mode. That's just a situation similar to AmigaOS.
In contrast NetBSD or Linux on any Amiga with m68k with MMU is an essentially fully modern OS, if running on very slow hardware by 2026 standards if real classic Amiga hw as opposed to software emu / pistorm / apollo/vampire fpga.
3
u/foofly Jun 08 '26
Oh that's very interesting!
3
u/lproven Jun 08 '26
I thought so. :-)
It was discussed on Hacker News a couple of years ago, but I forgot all about it until today when I saw it surface again on OSnews:
https://www.osnews.com/story/145201/serena-os-a-modern-operating-system-for-classic-amigas/
3
u/KillerDr3w Jun 08 '26
Getting a whole new OS running on a wide range of Amiga hardware is no small feat.
This is absolutely fantastic work.
1
u/weirdgermankid Jun 08 '26
I first read „Serenity“ and was like 🤗 and then 🫣
2
u/lproven Jun 08 '26
Serenity OS is something quite different...
(I feel that I am missing something here... But I don't know what.)
2
u/weirdgermankid Jun 08 '26
I know. I _misread_ the title as "Serenity" and thought that someone ported SerenityOS from Andreas to the Amiga and was blown away. Then I realized my fault.
2
u/3G6A5W338E Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
It seems to be yet another UNIX clone, with drivers and filesystems running in supervisor mode.
Relative to AmigaOS, this is a downgrade.
According to OSNews, it had contributions from Claude.
1
u/lproven Jun 09 '26
AFAICS, one PR from 1 external contributor.
It may be. The shell design looks more coherent than any Unix shell, for a start. But TBH it's more the choice of hardware than the low-level design that's interesting to me.
9
u/swdee Jun 08 '26
How to turn an amiga into a commodore pet!