ROOL aims high with their Moonshots initiative

The day before the RISC OS North show last week, RISC OS Open Ltd (ROOL) published an announcement in the news section of their website, and emailed a press release to draw attention to it¹. Titled ‘“Moonshots” initiative to Secure the Future of the OS’, the announcement outlines a significant problem that the operating system faces – one that most RISC OS users will already be well aware of: That RISC OS is 32-bit, while more and more new Arm processors are 64-bit.

To expand, a notable amount of the OS is still written – and maintained where necessary – in hand-crafted 32-bit Arm architecture assembly language (AArch-32). That means it can only be run on 32-bit Arm processors, but the Arm world is gradually moving on and 32-bit will eventually become a thing of the past, with newer devices being 64-bit (using AArch-64, the 64-bit architecure). The latest Raspberry Pi, for example, now sports a 64-bit processor; while RISC OS has been brought to the first four Raspberry Pi boards, it can’t currently be brought to the 5.

The upshot is that while RISC OS remains a 32-bit operating system, as more devices move to 64-bit Arm processors, there will be fewer potential targets to port it to – the RISC OS world will be limited to older platforms. We’ll be left behind.

To avoid any confusion, while the OS moved from 26-bit to 32-bit Arm processors relatively painlessly, the move from 32-bit to 64-bit is a fundamentally different and much harder task, because the latter instruction set is significantly different, so anything written in assembly language has to be rewritten, not simply tweaked.

So what’s the plan?

The company has been operating its bounty scheme since 2011, whereby members of the community can contribute what they can spare towards any given bounty to help fund development of whatever it covers. For example, there are bounties currently running for updating and debugging the USB stack, improving the filing system, and so on. However, these essentially cover ‘small’ things (for some values of small). They generally cover individual components or aspects of the OS, and while the amount of money collected can sometimes be impressive, it tends to be quite small for the potential amount of work involved, and those funds can take some time to build.

The Moonshots initiative aims bigger – the overarching aim is modernisation of the OS, but the first step along that road deals with the not insignificant issue above. Set up on the ROOL website as a bounty of sorts, the very first Moonshot is: Moonshot: 64-bit RISC OS, with a guide target of £2,500,000 – recognising that the amount of work involved in moving the operating system from 32-bit to 64-bit is far beyond what a traditional bounty can hope to achieve.

The high amount reflects what the guys at ROOL believe will cover the amount and scale of the work involved to make RISC OS 64-bit, covering the cost of hiring a number of developers for several years to work full-time on the project. With that in mind, ROOL’s Steve Revill has published an open letter (PDF) seeking “individuals and organisations who recognise the significance of RISC OS” and who can offer funding, expertise, advocacy, and anything else that may help achieve the goal.

The letter notes that RISC OS was first developed in Cambridge alongside the original Arm architecture – as we in the RISC OS community already know – and that the 40th anniversary of the first Arm chip is approaching. That’ll be 26th April, folks². With that in mind, wouldn’t it be nice if Arm the company could find a bit of loose change down the back of the water cooler to fund the operating system that – let’s be honest here – showcased the original Arm CPUs to the world and therefore laid the foundations for what they have become?

We can but dream.