Flavors

Ports are divided up into two major groups, or "flavors" in AROS terminology, namely "native" and "hosted".

Native ports run directly on the hardware and have total control over the computer. They will become the recommended way to run AROS in the future since it gives superior performance and efficiency, but they have currently only a limited support for hardware.

Hosted ports run on top of another operating system and do not access the hardware directly, but use the facilities provided by the host OS. The advantages of hosted ports is that they are easier to write since it is not necessary to write low-level drivers. Also, it greatly speeds up programming since we can run the development environment and AROS side-by-side without wasting time on constant reboots to try out new code.

Naming

The different AROS ports are named on the form <platform>-<cpu>, where <cpu> is the CPU architecture and <platform> is a symbolic name of the platform. The platform of a port can either be a hardware one for native ports, such as "pc" or "amiga", or an operating system for hosted ports, such as "linux" or "freebsd". In cases when it is not obvious that the topic is AROS it is common to prefix "AROS/" to the port name, giving you for example "AROS/pc-i386".

Portability

AROS executables for a specific CPU are portable across all ports using that CPU, which means that executables compiled for "pc-i386" will work fine on "linux-i386" and "freebsd-i386".

AROS/pc-i386 and x86-64

AROS/pc-i386 is the native port of AROS to the common IBM PC AT computers and compatibles using the x86 (or x86-64) family of processors. The name is actually a bit misleading since AROS/pc-i386 actually requires at least a 486 class CPU due to usage of some instructions not available on the 386. This machine also must be based on PCI bus.

This port works quite well, but we only have the most basic driver support. One of the biggest limitations is that we currently only have support for accelerated graphics on nVidia and ATI graphics hardware. Other graphics adapters must be used with generic (non-accelerated) VGA and VBE graphics drivers. There are more drivers in the works, but development is quite slow since we only have about 2.5 hardware hackers. This port is available for download.

AROS/pp-m68k

AROS/pp-m68k is the native port of AROS to the Palm line of handheld computers and compatibles ("pp" stands for "palm pilot", which was the name of the first handhelds of this line). This means that you might be able to take AROS with you in your pocket when traveling in the future...

This port is currently very raw. It does mostly work (running in an emulator, since nobody wants to risk trashing their expensive hardware just yet) but there is still a lot of work left. There is a graphics driver, but not any input ones. This port is not available for download at this time.

AROS/linux-i386 and x86-64

AROS/linux-i386 is the hosted port of AROS to the Linux operating system [1] running on the x86 (or x86-64) family of processors.

This is the most complete port of AROS feature-wise, since most of the developers currently use Linux when developing AROS, and there are far fewer drivers to write. This port is available for download.

AROS/freebsd-i386

AROS/freebsd-i386 is the hosted port of AROS to the FreeBSD operating system running on the x86 family of processors.

This port is relatively complete since it shares most of it's code with that of AROS/linux-i386, but since there aren't many developers that use FreeBSD it is lagging a little bit behind. We try to compile AROS/freebsd-i386 when doing snapshots, but it is not always possible, so it might not always be available for download.

AROS/linux-ppc

AROS/linux-ppc is the hosted port of AROS to the Linux operating system running on the PPC family of processors.

Rebuilding requires a patched gcc3.4.3. The diff file can be found in contrib/gnu/gcc.