MorphOS and MOL

[Samuel Rydh]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 05:01:52PM -0400, David Bélanger wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 18, 2003 at 03:07:40PM +0100, Natalia Portillo wrote:
> > Is it possible to run MorphOS under MOL?
> > 
> > It seems that uses a loading scheme similar to MacOS X.
> > 
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am not an expert on mol, but I think these things are quite OS
> specific.  So I will doubt it if mol runs MorphOS out of the box.  To
> add support, will probably require to write extra code.  It is not only
> the loading, there is also communication.
>
> For example,
> Linux will receives all the guest OS applications (e.g. OS X) system calls
> and must relay that to the guest OS.
> Linux has full control on hardware access.  So all OS X apps hardware
> access need to go through
> Linux somehow.

Close enough, but MOL does not really intercept system calls. What would
happen if one tries to boot MorphOS straight off is that Morph OS would see
"hardware" that it has no clue how to handle. One has to write drivers
for this virtual hardware in order to run Morph OS in MOL.

One alternative is emulating standard hardware in MOL. However, hardware
emulation in general is a bad idea since it might cause both stability and
performance problems. Some low-performance devices can be emulated without
much pain though (MOL emulates the OHCI USB controller for instance).

Writing a set of MOL drivers for an OS is not difficult, provided the
OS has a sane driver architecture. 

/Samuel