Author Topic: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?  (Read 7177 times)

Martin Iturbide

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Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« Reply #30 on: March 28, 2025, 01:51:48 pm »

I still think that we are falling behind in applications. A modern web browser will help on that, since there are a lot of applications that are on the web without the need to install those, and on the other side compiling and porting applications are now starting to get complicated because of the 32bits/Memory limitation.

A Modern Browser and solving the memory limitations are getting more important for new apps.

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Martin Iturbide
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Eugene Gorbunoff

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Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« Reply #31 on: March 29, 2025, 10:37:15 am »
memory issues:
as I understand, libc uses shared memory.
there were attempts to make it use HighMem.
There were discussions, there were announcements.
there were attempts to patch exe files to use HighMem.

But current situation: you can start Firefox and OpenOffice only 1 time.
if you load this heavy apps then memory is occupied and you should reboot system to use firefox again.
Java VM (I don't remember, does it depend on libc), is consuming low memory too.

Question: what is the current state of libc ? it was modified?

P.S. It's not a claim. I make  technical request.

« Last Edit: March 29, 2025, 10:46:19 am by Eugene Gorbunoff »

Lars

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Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« Reply #32 on: March 29, 2025, 02:32:38 pm »
About libc, read here:

https://github.com/bitwiseworks/libcx

section "Notes on C heap displacement."

Klafi

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Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« Reply #33 on: March 31, 2025, 11:44:03 am »
Dear all,
How about an OS/2 or ARCOS without Windows and DOS? Wouldn't that be easier?

Thanks everyone

Martin Iturbide

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Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« Reply #34 on: March 31, 2025, 02:14:31 pm »
Hello Klafi
Dear all,
How about an OS/2 or ARCOS without Windows and DOS? Wouldn't that be easier?

Thanks everyone

I personally don't use the DOS VDM and Win-OS/2 as a vital thing of OS/2, but I was amazed to to see some years ago the quantity of people defending it because they run a DOS or Win16 software on it.

If you think that ArcaOS without DOS VDM and Win-OS/2 will make it easier because some patent or fee that is currently part of Microsoft, and will make ArcaOS cheaper, I don't think so. It looks to me that IBM has the right over the MS binaries included in OS/2 and there is no active money exchange anymore. I think of this because the IBM and Microsoft Jointly development agreement that I was able to read, it says that both parties has the right of the source code exchanged there.

I also don't think that DOS VDM and Win-OS/2 is the only limitation for IBM not to open source OS/2. There is also a lot of MS code in PM, Kernel, drivers and also code from third parties (Adobe). Even that I think that Microsoft won't be a problem when open sourcing OS/2, I think IBM does not want to take the risk without a good business case that provides them more benefits then trouble.

But I'm open to other opinion and ideas.

Regards
Martin Iturbide
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Digi

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Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« Reply #35 on: April 01, 2025, 04:24:41 am »
How about an OS/2 or ARCOS without Windows and DOS? Wouldn't that be easier?

I think that DOS (and Win-OS2) should have been thrown out of the system many years ago. :-)

Roderick Klein

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Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« Reply #36 on: April 01, 2025, 08:12:08 am »
memory issues:
as I understand, libc uses shared memory.
there were attempts to make it use HighMem.
There were discussions, there were announcements.
there were attempts to patch exe files to use HighMem.

But current situation: you can start Firefox and OpenOffice only 1 time.
if you load this heavy apps then memory is occupied and you should reboot system to use firefox again.
Java VM (I don't remember, does it depend on libc), is consuming low memory too.

Question: what is the current state of libc ? it was modified?

P.S. It's not a claim. I make  technical request.

I think its kernel 14.203 from Arca Noae that resolves this issue. High memory with older kernel (if DLL's are loaded high into memory) and then unloaded the memory is not released.
Using the latest ArcaOS kernel this should work.

Roderick

Roderick Klein

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Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« Reply #37 on: April 01, 2025, 09:49:53 am »

I still think that we are falling behind in applications. A modern web browser will help on that, since there are a lot of applications that are on the web without the need to install those, and on the other side compiling and porting applications are now starting to get complicated because of the 32bits/Memory limitation.

A Modern Browser and solving the memory limitations are getting more important for new apps.

Regards

The memory limitation can be solved with magic wand with the current kernel. We might want to wish for this but its not going to happen.
Talk to Steve Levine who helps BWW out with debugging GCC programs. He also helps Paul Smedley to debug programs. But you need to use possibly memory dumps, Thesues and othee tootls to find out WHY a program runs out of memory.
From what I understand from Steve is that for example in the current PHP there is code added to prevent PHP for allocation more memory (Steve if you are reading can you comment please).  While not all limitations of 64 bit apps can be resolved some of them can be resolved by digging in the code for example and add checks to prevent it from consuming to much memory.  But this is of course time consuming process.

Roderick

Roderick Klein

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Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« Reply #38 on: April 01, 2025, 09:52:42 am »
Another up coming problem is IPv6, which luckily for us is taking forever to catch on. Eventually we would need a new network stack.

Its going to be interesting I would need to have more indications about this. What I see happening i that some modems from ISP have IPv4 emulation and tunnel over IPv6 if I get it correctly.
The company I work still has with 800 people IPv4 internally on the company LAN. I agree a multi protocol stack (Ipv4 and IPv6) might be nice to have but we simply lack the human resources.
From what I understand the old socketsk.sys is 98% recompiled FreeBSD code and 2 is OS/2 specific code. The point being we might be able to port a new stack from FreeBSD.
But this will not be done in month and will require a full time developer.

Roderick

Roderick Klein

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Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« Reply #39 on: April 01, 2025, 09:55:07 am »
Hello

For the moment we have in no specific order:
1) Modern web browser
2) Wifi Driver.
3) Memory issues
4) IPv6.

And side discussion:
1) There is no need to worry because we have virtualization.
2) The dislike of RPM/YUM or FHS.

Regards

It would be great if Arca Noae can officialy support QEMU as of version 2.92 or 2.94 QEMU now works with ArcaOS. But we would need mouse and clipboard integration.
I think VMworkstation is less attractive with the unknown commercial goals of Broadcom (read VMware). Sorry there ESXi server prices are a pure rip off. Some company customers I know that have seen in 1 year time
the cost of ESXi go up by a factor of 10. I wonder how price competitive VMware (Broadcom products will remain).

Roderick

Roderick Klein

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Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« Reply #40 on: April 01, 2025, 09:56:05 am »
Dear all,
How about an OS/2 or ARCOS without Windows and DOS? Wouldn't that be easier?

Thanks everyone

Its about 25% of the kernel source is the VDM support. But removing that is not going to make it easier I am afraid to get a new kernel.

Roderick