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WarpOS is a multi-tasking kernel for the PowerPC
PowerPC

PowerPC is a RISC instruction set architecture created by the 1991 Apple Inc.?IBM?Motorola alliance, known as AIM alliance. Originally intended for personal computers, PowerPC CPUs have since become popular embedded system and high-performance processors....
 architecture developed by Haage & Partner for the Amiga
Amiga

The Amiga is a family of personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation. Development on the Amiga began in 1982 with Jay Miner as the principal hardware designer....
 computer platform in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It ran on boards developed by phase5
Phase5

Phase5 Digital Products was a computer hardware manufacturer that made boards for the Amiga computer. Their most well known products were accelerator boards which replaced the CPU with a faster model....
 which contained both a Motorola 68k series
68k

The Motorola 680x0/m68k/68k/68K is a family of 32-bit Complex instruction set computer microprocessor central processing unit chips and was the primary competition for the Intel x86 family of chips in personal computers of the 1980s and early 1990s....
 CPU and PowerPC CPU with shared address space. WarpOS ran alongside the 68k based AmigaOS
AmigaOS

AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000....
 which could utilise the PowerPC as a coprocessor
Coprocessor

A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor . Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, Savitsky-Golay derivation, or encryption....
.

PowerUP boards were dual-processor boards, incorporating the PPC and a 68K processor (68LC040, 68040 or 68060). The AmigaOS
AmigaOS

AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000....
 still requires a 68K processor, while the PPC acts as an extremely fast coprocessor that carries out specific instructions.






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Encyclopedia


WarpOS is a multi-tasking kernel for the PowerPC
PowerPC

PowerPC is a RISC instruction set architecture created by the 1991 Apple Inc.?IBM?Motorola alliance, known as AIM alliance. Originally intended for personal computers, PowerPC CPUs have since become popular embedded system and high-performance processors....
 architecture developed by Haage & Partner for the Amiga
Amiga

The Amiga is a family of personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation. Development on the Amiga began in 1982 with Jay Miner as the principal hardware designer....
 computer platform in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It ran on boards developed by phase5
Phase5

Phase5 Digital Products was a computer hardware manufacturer that made boards for the Amiga computer. Their most well known products were accelerator boards which replaced the CPU with a faster model....
 which contained both a Motorola 68k series
68k

The Motorola 680x0/m68k/68k/68K is a family of 32-bit Complex instruction set computer microprocessor central processing unit chips and was the primary competition for the Intel x86 family of chips in personal computers of the 1980s and early 1990s....
 CPU and PowerPC CPU with shared address space. WarpOS ran alongside the 68k based AmigaOS
AmigaOS

AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000....
 which could utilise the PowerPC as a coprocessor
Coprocessor

A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor . Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, Savitsky-Golay derivation, or encryption....
.

History


In 1997, Phase5
Phase5

Phase5 Digital Products was a computer hardware manufacturer that made boards for the Amiga computer. Their most well known products were accelerator boards which replaced the CPU with a faster model....
, an Amiga
Amiga

The Amiga is a family of personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation. Development on the Amiga began in 1982 with Jay Miner as the principal hardware designer....
 hardware manufacturer, launched their range of PowerPC (PPC) accelerators. The PowerUP boards were dual-processor boards, incorporating the PPC and a 68K processor (68LC040, 68040 or 68060). The AmigaOS
AmigaOS

AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000....
 still requires a 68K processor, while the PPC acts as an extremely fast coprocessor that carries out specific instructions. Unfortunately, this causes significant slowdown when the OS task switches between the 68K and PPC. In an attempt to solve the problems that were raised and the lack of performance by PPC processor, Haage & Partner, an Amiga software and hardware manufacturer (which also created AmigaOS 3.9), developed a competing API called WarpOS
WarpOS

WarpOS is a multi-tasking kernel for the PowerPC architecture developed by Haage & Partner for the Amiga computer platform in the late 1990s and early 2000s....
. WarpOS versions up to V7 were wrappers added around Phase5's PowerUP
PowerUP (Kernel)

PowerUP is a multitasking kernel developed by Ralph Schmidt for phase5 PowerUP PowerPC accelerator boards for the Amiga computer platform in the mid 1990s....
 kernel but starting from version 8 it was its own PPC kernel running alongside AmigaOS.

WarpOS was intended to be used as a basis for AmigaOS 4
AmigaOS 4

AmigaOS 4 is a line of Amiga operating systems which runs on PowerPC microprocessors. "The Final Update" was released in 24 December 2006 after five years of development by the Belgian company Hyperion Entertainment under license from Amiga, Inc....
 but Haage & Partner dropped project when their AmigaOS 4 PPC contract was cancelled by Amiga in 2000.

Features


The WarpOS executables are called Extended Hunk format. When the AmigaOS
AmigaOS

AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000....
 sees this Hunk in the header of executable file, it passes directly the executable program to the PPC processor resident on the accelerator card.

The best feature of WarpOS is that it is system friendly with original Amiga executables which implemented the Amiga Hunk
Amiga Hunk

Hunk is the executable file format of tools and programs of the AmigaOS based on Motorola 68000 CPU and other processors of the same family.This kind of executable got its name from the fact that the software programmed on Amiga is divided in its internal structure into many pieces called hunks, in which every portion could contain eith...
 format of executables. This format was called EHF (Extended Hunk format), and implemented the hunk type named HUNK_PPC_CODE.

See also

  • Exec
    Exec (Amiga)

    Exec is the object-oriented multi-tasking kernel of AmigaOS. It enabled true pre-emptive multitasking in as little as 256 Kilobyte of free memory ....