ReactOS is aiming to be a rewrite. ArcaOS is a bundle of drivers and tools around a commercial operating system.
The Windows equivalent would be if somebody had a license to distribute Windows 2000, bundled it with drivers for modern hardware, backported Firefox to it, and created a UEFI loader for it.
The Windows equivalent would be if somebody had a license to distribute Windows 2000, bundled it with drivers for modern hardware, backported Firefox to it, and created a UEFI loader for it.
Lovely comparison. Well done.
I am with @fs111 here. I think that would interest me, too.
For me personally, W2K was the peak of the NT timeline and it’s been accelerating downhill since.
Just as MS Office 97 seemed bloated and sluggish when new, now, it’s my go-to version of MS Word, because it’s tiny and fast. XP seemed bloated when new, but compared even to Win7, it’s tiny and fast. On an 8MB Core 2 Duo it flies along.
As far as I understand from the eComstation days, nobody outside IBM has the full OS/2 kernel source code, so there is never going to be a 64-bit OS/2. This in contrast to ReactOS, which is open source.
OS/2 is a dead-end. This product is primarily especially interesting to companies that still have legacy OS/2-based systems running.
Can that be true? I would imagine the features ArcaOS has done would require the full sources, particularly ACPI and EFI booting. If not, while bizarre, it would be a phenomenal testament to whatever modular kernel engineering decisions allowed this level of evolution.
It’s a remarkable piece of work. It’s still a pig to install, as OS/2 always was. It’s still fussy about hardware and disk partitioning, as ever. But thanks to lots of generic drivers, it’s way less so.
I could only get it to dual-boot with FreeDOS, nothing newer. If a disk was set up by Windows or Linux, then ArcaOS couldn’t understand it.
But it’s blazingly fast, it can talk to USB and SATA and UEFI, and to Wifi. It has a useful browser, which is more than eComStation does.
It felt even faster than XP. It can run rings around any 64-bit version of Windows. It has DOS, Win16, native OS/2 16-bit and 32-bit apps, and some Linux ports. There’s a WINE-like layer called Odin that can let some Win32 apps run. It can drive 64 CPU cores and given over 4GB of RAM allocate the stuff above 4GB as a RAMdisk.
It is astonishingly capable for an OS whose kernel is from 1998 or so (with later fixpacks and updates).
It probably doesn’t understand GPT partitioning which is the default on newer OS installers, you could make at least Linux comply not sure if Windows will still oblige MBR.
(I don’t know whether to use a laugh or cry response.) Oh no no no. Nothing remotely so simple and easy.
The big new feature in ArcaOS 5.1 and the main thing that drove the entire project is UEFI support. That means it has to support GPT as UEFI firmware and GPT partitions go hand in hand.
ArcaOS can boot from both BIOS and UEFI, and it can boot from MBR on both and from GPT when using UEFI. (I am not sure if it can boot from GPT on BIOS.)
No no. When I say it can’t understand partitioning schemes from other OSes I am being literal.
On BIOS on MBR, its native format, in my testing, it can handle 1 primary FAT partition and then having a second partition with ArcaOS in it.
It will not attempt to install if there is a primary with anything else but DOS. It can’t handle it if there’s a primary with NT. It can’t handle extended partitions created by other OSes. It can’t handle Linux setups, primary or logical or both. It can’t handle BSD setups; I tried FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. WinXP 32, and 64, and Win7, and Win10.
For instance ArcaOS needs gaps between partitions. You must have at least 1 empty cylinder between partitions. Primary, gap, extended, gap, 1st logical, gap, 2nd logical, gap, etc. But even carefully creating this in (for example) Gparted is not enough.
You need to create the partitions in ArcaOS or in an OS/2-compatible partitioning tool, such as DFSee.
ArcaOS has its own internal LVM system and that can’t coexist with modern LBA-aware partitioning. The OS/2 kernel still seems to think in terms of cylinders, heads and tracks, and the modern interpretation of other OSes confuses it – fatally.
I could not get it to dual boot with any other 32-bit or 64-bit OS, at all, full stop.
Only with DOS. A single copy in a single partition.
The docs tell you to create all partitions only with ArcaOS itself before installing anything else. The snag is that other OSes then see that partitioning setup as corrupt and won’t use it, and if you let Linux or Windows repair it, then ArcaOS can’t use it.
Basically, you need to treat ArcaOS like ChromeOS: it needs to be the only OS on the hardware and it does not want to share with anything else. Do that, and there’s a much better chance things will work.
P.S. Yes, Win10 still supports MBR. It has a unique requirement though. As far as I can tell, you can only use MBR on BIOS machines, and only use GPT on UEFI machines. Windows won’t boot from GPT on BIOS or from MBR on UEFI.
Linux and other OSes don’t care; they can handle both, in any combination.
From what I’ve heard, they don’t have the source to some components (it may be simple as IBM losing the source), but they are allowed to do binary patches for what they don’t have source for. I’m not sure what components they’re binary patching versus having the source for though.
It’s a real shame. There will never be a 64-bit OS/2 but an x86-32 OS with in-kernel PAE, so it could allocate lots of RAM and have a big disk cache and lots and lots of 2GB apps, would be all I needed, I think.
I think that is partly why there is no FOSS release of OS/2.
IBM does not really care any more. Microsoft doesn’t either. I don’t think anyone in management really knows what they are any more.
I suspect the main motivations are just 2 non-technical issues:
There’s 3rd party code in there neither companies have the right to release. Nobody wants to spend the money to go through it and clean it up.
Simple shame. I suspect there are a lot of ugly hacks in there.
In an ideal world IBM and MS would do some kind of mutual accord where they give each other full rights to the code of each others’ that each company has, including to open source it. Maybe talk to any surviving companies whose code is in there: RealPlayer is long gone, MP3 is open now, there can only be ancient audio/video codecs… Maybe some hardware drivers? Try to get blanket permissions to release.
I’d believe that “MS <3 FOSS” if it released the source of all versions of DOS, Windows 1/2/3/9x, all forms of OS/2, and made all its DOS apps freeware. There is precedent: it did with MS Word 5.5 for DOS, as a Y2K fix for all older releases.
How does ArcaOS compare to ReactOS? It looks like they have commercial funding, that’s promising.
ReactOS is aiming to be a rewrite. ArcaOS is a bundle of drivers and tools around a commercial operating system.
The Windows equivalent would be if somebody had a license to distribute Windows 2000, bundled it with drivers for modern hardware, backported Firefox to it, and created a UEFI loader for it.
I feel like there would be a market for that OS.
There were a lot of folks I knew who ran win2k as our desktop OS for probably longer than we should because it really Just Worked.
Lovely comparison. Well done.
I am with @fs111 here. I think that would interest me, too.
For me personally, W2K was the peak of the NT timeline and it’s been accelerating downhill since.
Same, though I might draw the “peak” line at server 2k3 R2 x64.
It’s a slippery slope, but that was more or less the last of the old GDI-based line, before Vista and its built-in compositor.
I tried running XP 64 as my main OS just 2Y ago. It was a surprisingly good experience. https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/24/dangerous_pleasures_win_xp_in_23/
Just as MS Office 97 seemed bloated and sluggish when new, now, it’s my go-to version of MS Word, because it’s tiny and fast. XP seemed bloated when new, but compared even to Win7, it’s tiny and fast. On an 8MB Core 2 Duo it flies along.
As far as I understand from the eComstation days, nobody outside IBM has the full OS/2 kernel source code, so there is never going to be a 64-bit OS/2. This in contrast to ReactOS, which is open source.
OS/2 is a dead-end. This product is primarily especially interesting to companies that still have legacy OS/2-based systems running.
Can that be true? I would imagine the features ArcaOS has done would require the full sources, particularly ACPI and EFI booting. If not, while bizarre, it would be a phenomenal testament to whatever modular kernel engineering decisions allowed this level of evolution.
I think it is true, and yes, it is a testament.
I interviewed Lewis Rosenthal: https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/19/retro_tech_week_arca_os/
And I reviewed ArcaOS: https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/04/arcaos_51/
It’s a remarkable piece of work. It’s still a pig to install, as OS/2 always was. It’s still fussy about hardware and disk partitioning, as ever. But thanks to lots of generic drivers, it’s way less so.
I could only get it to dual-boot with FreeDOS, nothing newer. If a disk was set up by Windows or Linux, then ArcaOS couldn’t understand it.
But it’s blazingly fast, it can talk to USB and SATA and UEFI, and to Wifi. It has a useful browser, which is more than eComStation does.
It felt even faster than XP. It can run rings around any 64-bit version of Windows. It has DOS, Win16, native OS/2 16-bit and 32-bit apps, and some Linux ports. There’s a WINE-like layer called Odin that can let some Win32 apps run. It can drive 64 CPU cores and given over 4GB of RAM allocate the stuff above 4GB as a RAMdisk.
It is astonishingly capable for an OS whose kernel is from 1998 or so (with later fixpacks and updates).
It probably doesn’t understand GPT partitioning which is the default on newer OS installers, you could make at least Linux comply not sure if Windows will still oblige MBR.
(I don’t know whether to use a laugh or cry response.) Oh no no no. Nothing remotely so simple and easy.
The big new feature in ArcaOS 5.1 and the main thing that drove the entire project is UEFI support. That means it has to support GPT as UEFI firmware and GPT partitions go hand in hand.
ArcaOS can boot from both BIOS and UEFI, and it can boot from MBR on both and from GPT when using UEFI. (I am not sure if it can boot from GPT on BIOS.)
No no. When I say it can’t understand partitioning schemes from other OSes I am being literal.
On BIOS on MBR, its native format, in my testing, it can handle 1 primary FAT partition and then having a second partition with ArcaOS in it.
It will not attempt to install if there is a primary with anything else but DOS. It can’t handle it if there’s a primary with NT. It can’t handle extended partitions created by other OSes. It can’t handle Linux setups, primary or logical or both. It can’t handle BSD setups; I tried FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. WinXP 32, and 64, and Win7, and Win10.
For instance ArcaOS needs gaps between partitions. You must have at least 1 empty cylinder between partitions. Primary, gap, extended, gap, 1st logical, gap, 2nd logical, gap, etc. But even carefully creating this in (for example) Gparted is not enough.
You need to create the partitions in ArcaOS or in an OS/2-compatible partitioning tool, such as DFSee.
https://www.dfsee.com/
Paid, not included with ArcaOS.
ArcaOS has its own internal LVM system and that can’t coexist with modern LBA-aware partitioning. The OS/2 kernel still seems to think in terms of cylinders, heads and tracks, and the modern interpretation of other OSes confuses it – fatally.
I could not get it to dual boot with any other 32-bit or 64-bit OS, at all, full stop.
Only with DOS. A single copy in a single partition.
The docs tell you to create all partitions only with ArcaOS itself before installing anything else. The snag is that other OSes then see that partitioning setup as corrupt and won’t use it, and if you let Linux or Windows repair it, then ArcaOS can’t use it.
Basically, you need to treat ArcaOS like ChromeOS: it needs to be the only OS on the hardware and it does not want to share with anything else. Do that, and there’s a much better chance things will work.
P.S. Yes, Win10 still supports MBR. It has a unique requirement though. As far as I can tell, you can only use MBR on BIOS machines, and only use GPT on UEFI machines. Windows won’t boot from GPT on BIOS or from MBR on UEFI.
Linux and other OSes don’t care; they can handle both, in any combination.
From what I’ve heard, they don’t have the source to some components (it may be simple as IBM losing the source), but they are allowed to do binary patches for what they don’t have source for. I’m not sure what components they’re binary patching versus having the source for though.
I think this is correct.
It’s a real shame. There will never be a 64-bit OS/2 but an x86-32 OS with in-kernel PAE, so it could allocate lots of RAM and have a big disk cache and lots and lots of 2GB apps, would be all I needed, I think.
I wonder if it’s because Microsoft still has licensing rights to chunks of OS/2 and are still holding a grudge.
I don’t think so.
I think that is partly why there is no FOSS release of OS/2.
IBM does not really care any more. Microsoft doesn’t either. I don’t think anyone in management really knows what they are any more.
I suspect the main motivations are just 2 non-technical issues:
There’s 3rd party code in there neither companies have the right to release. Nobody wants to spend the money to go through it and clean it up.
Simple shame. I suspect there are a lot of ugly hacks in there.
In an ideal world IBM and MS would do some kind of mutual accord where they give each other full rights to the code of each others’ that each company has, including to open source it. Maybe talk to any surviving companies whose code is in there: RealPlayer is long gone, MP3 is open now, there can only be ancient audio/video codecs… Maybe some hardware drivers? Try to get blanket permissions to release.
I’d believe that “MS <3 FOSS” if it released the source of all versions of DOS, Windows 1/2/3/9x, all forms of OS/2, and made all its DOS apps freeware. There is precedent: it did with MS Word 5.5 for DOS, as a Y2K fix for all older releases.
Where is the download link? I wanted to try it out. I signed up and there’s no download links.
AIUI you’re supposed to buy it.