Warpstock 2024 - Day 3

OS/2 Warp. ArcaOS. eComStation.

[@His_Cifnes]

The thing with 64bit is, everybody wonders why one should have a 64bit OS/2 kernel, when there are no applications for this. The same applies for PAE. Applications need to make use of this feature. The answer is: Because the operating system does not support it. - So (still existing) developers cannot adjust their applications to make use of these "features". --> When the operating system does not make the offer, nothing will ever change. - So the operating system needs to get the snowball rolling. At first this might seem pretty obsolete, since no applications (right away) make use of it, but over time, developers WILL make use of these new possibilities. Old applications will neither be upgraded, nor will they ever need to support 64bit or PAE, as they do not make use of huuuge ammounts of memory. New applications, mostly ported to run under OS/2, however ARE still maintained and WILL make use of these features once the operating system opens up new ways to manage memory. Without the offer of the operating system "Hey, we support 64bit now. - That's the future!" or "Hey, we do offer PAE now. - Make use of it!" nothing will ever change. Remember Windows XP 64? Everybody wondered what's so cool about it, and why there are no drivers available. But Microsoft did it: They OFFERED, and developers accepted! (Not for XP though, but for the following iterations of Windows) If Microsoft would have decided that 64bit would make no sense, nothing would have ever changed in the Windows world. Same with Linux: "What's 64bit for anyway? My applications run fine on 32bit... and you would need to rewrite it all to make it work on 64bit." We all know how things turned out: We've go loads of RAM to waste these days, we can have browser sessions with more than X GB of RAM per tab (process) usage each for the browser alone.. - There are no limits anymore. (atleast for the moment) And all this only because the operating systems went on and decided to OFFER 64bit to the developers. - They took the opportunity and moved on from 32bit. I know OS/2 is different, because of developer man power. But still, if you do not offer, noone can accept, and everything stays as it is.... which is not good, because we all see the memory barrier, and we are not only starting to realise, we KNOW that 4 GB of RAM hinder our daily work, especially using ported software. But it was said, that ArcaNoae does not have the source for the kernel.. so 64bit seems impossible.... would require a rewrite... and that's not going to happen because of developer man power. Okay... then the PAE extension. - If there is no offer, nothing will change. The offer needs to be first. Then developers will follow, and over time, (maintained) applications will go PAE supporting. The unmaintained applications will remain in their memory range, which isn't much of a problem, as they ran fine where they are. - No rewrite necessary. - It's just the new stuff, that requires lots of memory, and this is the target group to lure with PAE support. - They might actually make use of it! : ] Cif

[@classicalgrooming]

I think that the containerization idea would be great! My interest in OS/2 has waned over the years, but I certainly would love to see it have a resurgence. I don't know if there is a WINE port for OS/2.