> I would still rather start at square 1 on some risc 64 bit virtual 48 bit physical word system.
A friend of mine wrote a little OS (similar to vxWorks) for 64-bit MIPS in the 90s; I helped him debug a couple of problems. This was actual production code to go in a product (our employer was too cheap to license vxWorks for the secondary processor in the product).
It's incredibly easy to get something up and running on an architecture like this. (Admittedly he cheated by virtue of not needing to interface with hw to get loaded -- everything gets much easier when your EEPROM is wired to the boot vector.) Get your kernel data structures set up, handle interrupts, and BOOM! you've got multitasking. (I think it took him about a week.)
A friend of mine wrote a little OS (similar to vxWorks) for 64-bit MIPS in the 90s; I helped him debug a couple of problems. This was actual production code to go in a product (our employer was too cheap to license vxWorks for the secondary processor in the product).
It's incredibly easy to get something up and running on an architecture like this. (Admittedly he cheated by virtue of not needing to interface with hw to get loaded -- everything gets much easier when your EEPROM is wired to the boot vector.) Get your kernel data structures set up, handle interrupts, and BOOM! you've got multitasking. (I think it took him about a week.)