PowerUp-to-date

2. WarpUp v4 available

From the homepage of Haage & Partner (http://www.haage-partner.com) you can download the new revision 4 of the PowerPC system software WarpUp. The new features are listed here:

»WarpUP Release 4

The release 4 of WarpUP mainly features numerous enhancements, which were desired by developers so that they can work on their projects as easily and efficiently as possible. It is to be expected that quite soon software will be release requiring WarpUP 4 to be installed.

WarpUP 4 also wants to build a bridge across different worlds. With the addition of the PowerUP Emulation of Frank Wille the possibility is provided to run PowerUP applications under WarpOS, so that even these applications can benefit from the outstanding multitasking capabilities of WarpOS. The enclosed version already supports the new features of WarpUP 4.


Most important news

• The memory management of WarpOS was completely replaced. The new memory management is about factor 4-5 faster than the old one, this means, that applications which intensively allocate/deallocate memory using the WarpOS functions will benefit. Thanks a lot to Frank Wille for the implementation of the new memory management.

• Together with the new memory management a pooled memory API is provided, which is identical to the corresponding API of exec.

• The semaphore features of WarpOS were enhanced much. Now 'shared semaphores' and message based semaphore obtaining/releasing are supported.

• Now the meaning of the task signals can be changed using SetExceptPPC, so that an exception handler is executed, if such a signal is sent. This function corresponds to the appropriate exec function with some minor difference (which certainly is documented in the autodocs).

• Now it is possible to add interrupt handlers to WarpOS, which can be invoked both by the PPC- and the 68K side. With that a new way of communication between 68K and PPC is provided, which will be important for some specialized applications.

• In the past it was quite painful to make sure, that new tasks started using CreateTaskPPC get the r2 of their mother task (which means, that they can access the mother task's variables). Now a new flag was added, which makes it very easy to achieve the same result.

• The creation of PPC tasks from the 68K side was made easier by providing the function CreatePPCTask. This function itself calls the PPC function CreateTaskPPC.

• A new env variable 'powerpc/seginfo' enables a new debugging capability. Whenever a task crashes, segment information (hunk/offset pairs) are printed out to sushi resp. the serial interface. These information can be used to identify the location of the command which caused the crash. If desired the whole stackframe is scanned and all locations of higher-level function calls are also printed out. This new feature requires the 'segtracker' tool to be installed.

• The installer of WarpUP V4 was revised and made more secure. Now it is almost impossible to install WarpUP the wrong way, because most env variables can't be configured anymore using the installer. These variable are set in a way which should care for maximal reliability.

Most important bugfixes

A problem with the terminator 2 was fixed, which could lead to WarpUP not starting on some BlizzardPPC systems.

The famous 'ramlib' problem was again improved. Again it should be noted that these 'ramlib' problems only can appear when PPC shared libraries are used (since there are still people around which see this issue as advantage of PowerUP but forget, that there are almost none AMIGA-OS compatible shared libraries for PowerUP available).

There was a quite severe bug in the scheduler, which could lead to multitasking hang-ups in some special situations. This is corrected now.

The function 'FreeVecPPC' sometimes could trash several registers (especially when freeing large amount of memory). This is corrected now.


Software/Tools

In the WarpUP 4 distribution the PowerUP emulation of Frank Wille is provided. The core of this emulation is a ppc.library, which, in contrary to the original ppc.library of Phase5, works under WarpOS. This way it is possible to run PowerUP applications under WarpOS, in parallel to WarpUP applications.

The current version of the PowerUP emulation is V0.6 and it requires WarpUP 4 (powerpc.library V15).

It is strongly recommended to read the corresponding text files in the directory 'PowerUPEmu', to make the software working correctly and to get aware of all restrictions (mainly concerning compatibility).

IMPORTANT: the WarpUP V4 installer always sets the terminator variable 'powerpc/terminator' to 2. This setting leads to the best possible reliability of WarpOS itself, but has the effect, that the PowerUP emulation and WarpOS don't work together anymore. CyberStormPPC users should set the variable to zero, if the PowerUP emulation should be used. BlizzardPPC users have a more difficult job (thanks to the Flash ROM) and should read the file 'PowerUPEmu/README'.

In the directory 'tools/BPPCFix' there is a tool (again from Frank Wille), which allows to reboot a BlizzardPPC based system in a way, that the ppc.library is not started anymore after reboot. This leads to a major improvement of the situation for the BlizzardPPC users, because they don't have to use the dirty termination procedure anymore to launch WarpUP applications. For more information please read the file 'tools/BPPCFix/BPPCFix.readme'.

In the directory 'tools' there is the program 'WarpStat', which shows the load of the CPU and of the different task using a graphical user interface. This program requires MUI.«

(Source: Haage & Partner)