Flavors

Ports are divided 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 have names that of the form <platform>-<cpu>, where <platform> is a symbolic name for the platform and <cpu> is the CPU architecture. For a native port, the platform refers to the hardware, such as "pc" or "amiga"; for a hosted port it refers to an operating system, such as "linux" or "freebsd". In situations where it might not be obvious that the topic is AROS, "AROS/" is commonly prefixed to the port name, giving you e.g. "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/amiga-m68k

AROS/amiga-m68k is the native port for m68k Amigas, or emulators like WinUAE. This version is binary compatible with AmigaOS.

AROS/pc-i386 and pc-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 port also requires that the computer is PCI-based.

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.

AROS/pc-x86_64-smp

AROS/pc-x86_64-smp is an experimental port with support for some kind of Symmetric MultiProcessing.

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.

AROS/mingw32-i386

This port is intended to run on Microsoft Windows (beginning from Windows 98) as the hosted system.

AROS/darwin-i386 and darwin-x86_64

The hosted version for Darwin and MacOS X on the i386 and x86_64 platform. This should work on all Intel MacOS X versions starting from 10.4. It requires an X11 server for the display.

AROS/darwin-ppc

The hosted version for Darwin and MacOS X on the PowerPC platform. This should work on all MacOS X versions. It requires an X11 server for the display.

AROS/raspi-armhf

The native version for ARMv6 based Raspberry Pi computers.

AROS/sam440-ppc

The native version for Sam440EP, Sam440EP Flex and Sam460ex computers.