[openbeos] Re: Support for Ancient Computers?

On 7/20/07, Nicholas Blachford <nicholas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Modern OSs are quite amazingly bloated, by that I don't mean they
have too many features, I mean they are slow and take up vast amounts
of RAM.  Each generation it gets worse, yet they are not doing a
great deal more than they did before, modern software is quite
amazingly inefficient.  They do more but sure as hell not enough to
require 10X the memory and 10X the CPU power.


I heartily agree. This is one of the main reasons I support and code
for Haiku. It actually disgusts me how wasteful Windows Vista seems to
be. It should not REQUIRE 1 GB of RAM and a blazing fast CPU to have a
decent computing experience. I'm sorry Microsoft apologists, that is
absurd.

Linux and Mac OS X may not be quite as bad, but I think they have
their inefficiencies too, especially in the GUI area.


I've always seen the relatively light memory and power usage of BeOS
as a *good* thing.


Most definitely. I don't think anyone would ever say "darn, this
system is just too fast!" ;)


Such low resource consumption also means Haiku is open to usage in
embedded systems and low end computing devices, e.g. Via machines or
even the Efika.


I think the above are definitely a good niche market for Haiku to aim
at eventually.


If you have an OS which can run on systems with limited power and
limited memory it's going to run a whole lot faster on modern PCs.  I
have a 150MHz Cyrix PC with a S3 Virge graphics card and BeOS runs
pretty respectably on it, it goes like a bat out of hell on the
800Mhz Athlon with 1st gen Radeon.


Yep. I also think Haiku should strive to run as efficiently as BeOS in
general and on older systems.


Supporting older (or maybe lower end) systems also give you insurance
against a problem nobody seems to have noticed yet - CPUs are not
getting faster any more, everyone think their rate of improvement is
slowing down, what's actually happening is quad core processors run
serial code *slower* than dual or singe core chips.  This is not
likely to change, in fact it'll get a lot worse as core numbers
increase.  Before you may say BeOS is multithreaded look up "Amdahl's
law" - multithreaded software only runs as fast as the slowest serial
part.


Yes, the whole multi-core thing is not the panacea a lot of people
think it is. For one thing few applications make use of multiple
threads even if the OS supports that.

I can recall people complaining how the pervasive multi-threading of
BeOS made it hard to develop for (which is true, multi-thread
programming is harder) but it just seems like Be, Inc. was just 10
years too early. Haiku is now in a position to be the premiere OS for
the latest multi-core CPUs, since the whole system, from the OS down
to applications, is designed to use multiple threads.

Ryan

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