The first news report on Athene’s upcoming commercial release reveals an all-new accelerated graphics system and a new set of screenshots showing some of the new features of the coming release.
Athene Goes Commercial; Drops X11 Back-End
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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What exactly is this… another linux based distro’s or a complete new kindof OS…
Just make a search about “RockLyte” on osnews. We have much coverage on them, and even an interview.
Athene is just the graphical part of the OS. It runs on top of both Linux and Windows.
The graphics system in use (as shown in the screenshots) is an accelerated and lightweight graphics architecture – not X11! At this stage we can tell you: Graphics support originates from a third party company and hardware aceleration is supported for all modern graphics cards.
Supports all modern graphics cards, eh? Well, that would preclude a DirectFB solution (see http://www.directfb.org/modules.xml for DirectFB’s current hardware compatibility. DirectFB doesn’t support NVIDIA Geforces or ATI Radeons, possibly the two most popular graphics cards of late)
I wonder what they’re using for backend drivers.
The speed increase over the X11 based version of Athene is typically 5 – 20%, although in some critical areas the new architecture has provided as much as a 300% increase in speed over X11.
Provided they’re using shared memory properly that shouldn’t be hard to achieve. It’d be nice if they give specifics as to how their architecture works.
You can also expect support for the ‘little things’ like gamma correction, resolution and colour depth switching, full colour mouse pointers and other graphical features expected from a modern operating system.
Very intriguing indeed… they’re claiming it’s already full-featured. I’ll be looking forward to some more specifics on this architecture.
If they get standard toolkits ported to their drawing libraries it should prove worthwhile, and it sounds like they’ve done that.
Athene is actually a new operating platform in a sense, because it is not dependant on the underlying OS at all. It runs on Linux right now, but it could run on FreeBSD or some other underlying OS. With the new graphics device driver architecture it is no longer dependant on X11 for the graphics side, it can run any any platform that can support the services needed by the OS. It could even run on Windows, but who would want that ;-).
The graphics device driver architecture used by Athene is SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux. Given the fact it uses SciTech SNAP, the whole GUI component is now completely portable to multiple platforms including embedded systems. It could even run in 32-bit DOS if the authors desired to port it there 😉
For more information on SciTech SNAP, see:
http://www.scitechsoft.com/products/embedded/sdk_home.html
Will there be a version for FreeBSD 5.x ? (it would rock n roll !)
Anyone knows aproximately how much to buy this new commercial operating platform ?
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The release notes made me think:
If it can be ported to Windows NT/98 and run on top of it (with the new graphical/windowing server) could it run win32 applications without an emulation ?
(I confess I’m a complete ignorant on Athene
No, it would not be able to run Win32 apps natively because it would not have the GDI interface. But more to the point, there is no reason you would want to do this. If you have Windows, you don’t need Athene. If you have Athene, you don’t wan’t Windows 😉
I was thinking of SNAP as a read the first three comments, and I was surprised to scroll down and find confirmation in the fifth one! But speaking of SNAP, where is this open source release we were promised? Is it still on track?
PS> Actually, I was hoping they’d come up with a mechansim to load X11 drivers instead. Loading the NVIDIA binary drivers and getting accelerated OpenGL would be *very* useful.
!! That was a fast answer 🙂 ( I just reloading the forum page)
Do you know someone at Athene who could push the team to make it run on FreeBSD ?
(The Athene ‘boot menu’ screenshot is not on http server).
It’s not hard to outshine X speed wise… why can’t X shine with it’s über performance as much as the Linux kernel? You don’t see anyone coming out stating to be “10-15% faster then linux kernel X.X.X”, except perhaps newer Linux kernels, but I constantly see these type of things with stuff being 10-15% (or more) faster then X, and it kind of wipes the Linux grin of ones face pretty fast.
Rayiner, the Open Source release is on schedule. The GPL version of the SDK has already been released and is available from our ftp site. The documentation for the SDK is already completed and available on the web site in HTML form (soon to be uploaded to the ftp site for offline viewing). The DDK is moving along nicely, but it is not quite ready yet.
As for loading X11 drivers, that would not be a very good option. X11 drivers are very X11 centric, and do not map very well to the internal Athene device driver model. Also with accelerated OpenGL support, it would be better to define a proper 3D device driver model (which we are working on) for Athene, and then if the interest is there NVIDIA could port their binary only drivers to that system. Their OpenGL code is very portable, so I am sure it would port easily enough (they just won’t let the source code out ;-).
Chicobaud, as for porting to FreeBSD, I have no idea on the status of that port. I know there is significant interest in it, but you would have to ask the Athene folks directly about that.
Cyco, the problem of speed in X11 is due to the client/server architecture. It could be made a lot faster if there was a DRM style architecture devloped for XFree86 for 2D operations, but there does not appear to be any interest in doing that within the XFree86 team.
I am impressed by AtheneOS. I keep track on their progress since the first time it was mentioned on OSNews. I have to admit, their font rendering (according to the screen shots) looks mighty impressive. In my own opinion, good font rendering is very important if they have (and they probably have) intentions to be on the desktop.
The only thing holding back support for FreeBSD are general hardware support and installation issues. If it can get it up to scratch with Linux in these areas, it would get our immediate support as the kernel of choice. I’ll be watching the 5.x series with much anticipation…
So, they drop X11 compatibility, claim they have ‘little things’ that Xfree86 has already addressed in the upcoming release (resolution switching, full color mouse pointers, etc), have NO hardware OpenGL support, and it costs money too?! Wow, where do I sign up??? 🙂
-fooks
It seems funny that the download has no tar file, like tar.gz or tar.bz2..
Honestly? Not that impressed. Kinda unpolished looking, windows have very unusual switching semantics (no visible taskbar in most “themes”). Most of all, fonts don’t look as good as in KDE and it’s really not that fast. Even if the X-less version is 15-20% faster, it won’t be noticibly faster than Qt apps are now, and those Qt apps are a whole lot prettier.
So is this like Qube?
Why is it that every product that uses XML as a friggin “key component” gets touted as being innovative and the wave of the future? Gee…
Hmm. If my memory serves me, Athene sprung from her fathers skull. Maybe that explains something…
no hardware OpenGL support
The apps that use opengl on linux aren’t that used on Linuxdaily jobs/tasks (except gamers).
(there a list on opengl.org)
Uh…this is…weird. It looks more like an application that a real operating system. If you can’t boot into it, and it runs within Windows, what differentiates it from a real live OS? I mean, sure, it’s got file structure, but that could easily just be faked. If it runs within Windows, isn’t all of the kenel stuff wasted? Because it all has to go through Windows anyway.
Well, I do use OpenGL apps daily, for graphing and playing around with Blender and Houdini (apprentice ed), and so do a lot of other people. Beyond that, not having hardware OpenGL closes the way to a lot of nifty things people are doing with OpenGL in 2D, ala EVAS or Windows LongHorn. For example, there is an SVG viewer that uses OpenGL and performs 10x as fast as Adobe’s software viewer.
An OS is more than just a kernel. An OS is the entire user environment on top of the kernel. You could (theoretically) replace the Linux kernel with the Windows kernel, and you wouldn’t notice any differences in user space other than differences in performance characteristics. It would be just like the OS you normally think of as “Linux.” Thus, if you use the Linux kernel with a different user environment, you can legitimately call it a different OS.
Maybe a stupid question, but is there any Internet capabilities? Chat programs? Anything? It would be fun to use.
It does seem more line an app …or an emulator than a Real OS. It sure ain’t BeOS 5 PE or QNX RTOS 6, or NewDeal(GEOS) which run within files on a windows partition,but boot into their own separate entities,this thing runs in a window with windows still running behind it,kinda like some of the emulators i have for BeOS.
I would like to see this running stand-alone so I could tell which is live and which is memorex ,so to speak!In other words it’s hard to tell what this will do by itself because i think it steals it’s drivers and such from the underlying system.
The speed increase over the X11 based version of Athene is typically 5 – 20%, although in some critical areas the new architecture has provided as much as a 300% increase in speed over X11.
Notice the wording here. All this says is that their app runs faster now than it did over X11, not that it’s a 5-300% improvement over X11-based apps in general. There may be some improvement, but that’s not spoken to by the press release, that I could see.
This is a very interesting and ambitious project, but some other questions occur to me: I wonder if it has any support for network transparency? We use that feature of X11 at work every day. What about portability of their backend to different OSes and architectures? And how much testing has this new “no legacy code” backend architecture seen? With a project of this scale I would expect there to be tons of defects that would have to be shaken out before it would be ready for production use.
I assume you were talking about me (anonymous). And I think you have summed it up perfectly. I notice that there was sound, however there was no driver detection (that I know of) or anything. It looks like an amazing operating system, except for the fact that all I’m seeing is the GUI. I don’t get to see how it really performs. Even BeOS was its own OS. Sure, it launched in Windows, but it was its own OS.
and playing around with Blender and Houdini
OK you are right. It’s just that 50% ? of what most people use never comes closer to needing OpenGL.
Blender is quite fun to play (still a little rough on the corners
Is there any relation to AtheOS?
What happened to that one?
no relation.
For info on AtheOS check out http://www.atheos.cx
AtheOS lives on in Syllable http://syllable.sourceforge.net
“You could (theoretically) replace the Linux kernel with the Windows kernel”
OK, I think I am going to be sick now.
I mean how would this company make money out of this product? Who would buy it? I mean, it sounds cool, but I don’t know one person that would need it. And with its limited amount of apps, who would use it?….
Not to long ago the same could have been said about Linux and, a now very long list of spin-offs.
Not really. Linux was a totally open source, actively developed UNIX kernel at a time where there was none (FreeBSD didn’t come until several years after). That’s something new and different. While I agree you probably couldn’t predict it’s commercial success back then, you could see traits that it had that could potentially make it successful. What dtraits does Athene have that differentiates it from everything else, and could potentially make it successful?
> no relation.
Thanks. But I was really thinking about
that high security OS that should have
replaced MacOS Classic. AFAIK it was
developed, but never really released
by a small german company.
Wasn’t that also called AtheOS?
Rayiner, is really it that hard to figure out? The announcement already tells you that although it uses a Linux backend, it has a superior graphics system to every Linux distro ever released. That’s differentation right there. Every person that has been dissatisfied with being stuck with X11 now has the option of using an alternative. There are dozens of features that are also particular to Athene’s design structure, all of which are listed on the web site.
I don’t see why it should have to be spelt out for you – the information is right there for everybody to read. There are plenty of people excited about its potential and there’ll be a lot of value crammed into the commercial release to make this a very special and unique system.
I wouldn’t call a 15-20% performance without any detailed benchmarks or case analysis “superior.” It may very well be faster than X11 (I’ll believe it when I see it), but it is a big step back from all the other features X11 has (hardware OpenGL!), and a gigantic step back from the features that the modern desktop environments have. Even if the performance claims hold out, and even if their performance improvements can keep pace with XFree’s (5.0 is supposed to be a significant step forward) is that little bit of extra performance enough to distinguish it?
BTW, the comment about Linux being the only Open Source operating system around at the time is bogus. The FreeBSD variants were around before Linux existed, and in fact there was a project called 386BSD that was what I was using before I first used Linux. Many variants spun off from that, but the Open BSD versions have been around longer than Linux. Linux succeeded earlier because there was no infighting (unlike in the BSD camps…).
Can you say more about XFree 5.0, please?
also stopped things on the BSD front. I doubt that Linux would’ve become preeminent had BSD been under a legal cloud for so long.
1) Linux has little commercial value. For its market share in any market, how much money are Linux companies are making? The people making money out of Linux are hardware companies, but why would they want to support this? The idea is nice and cool and all, but not really needed.
2) Athene isn’t open source. Linux is. And if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be where it is today. That’s why I posted the question. Because without money, how is a company gonna survive? When it dies, who would resume development?
Infighting didn’t stop development and adoption. The most recent, the one in NetBSD which created OpenBSD, didn’t hinder development or adoption of NetBSD is a significant way. What stoped adoption is the AT&T suite, which many would-be users fear would cause BSD to be pulled from the market and their products would cease development.
I hope that they open source their graphic system and rid the world of X11.
And NO! i don’t care about network transparency