WarpOS is a multitasking kernel for the PowerPC (PPC) architecture central processing unit (CPU) developed by Haage & Partner for the Amiga computer platform in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Despite its name, it is not an operating system (OS), but a kernel; it supplies a limited set of functions similar to those in AmigaOS for using the PowerPC.
When released, its original name was WarpUP, but was changed to reflect its greater feature set, and possibly to avoid comparison with its competitor, PowerUP.
The more CPU switches occur in an application, the more the slowdown, often so much that it was pointless to use the PPC processor, being slower than the 68k native binary.
Most pertinently, it used the PowerOpen application binary interface (ABI), in contrast to PowerUP which used the newer and better supported UNIX System V (SysV), which ensured both kernels could not be directly compatible.
From version 14, the WarpOS kernel used a slightly different multitasking scheduler than AmigaOS (or PowerUP), based on that in Unix systems with "nice" values, and priorities for its own tasks and processes.
[10] WarpOS also had an inbuilt debugger which could be sent to dump information on any crashed tasks to either console window on screen or to serial, depending on environment variables.
Phase5 claimed correctly that this hardware problem could not be circumvented by simply optimising the kernel and was a limitation inherent to the almost unique board design, which shared the memory bus between two CPUs of radically different families.
[5] Despite there being little or no real difference in performance, debugging capability, usability or stability in either system, and it had become patently clear that neither could hope to work around the hardware context switch issue, a series of claims were made on each side and much fighting in Usenet followed.
", referring to the ELF fileformat[6]) of Hyperion Entertainment CVBA was particularly infamous for his "political" ports being so rushed that they lacked sound or were very unstable, being released just to make up the numbers and produce a list of software greater than that of PowerUP.
[2] When Hyperion Entertainment took over the project, they originally had the same idea, but it was later admitted by their developers that it was of very little use in modernising the OS, being written wholly in non-annotated machine code assembly language.