Palm OS 5 is an ARM's Length Away
Source: SILICON VALLEY
Developers in the handheld sector have had an interesting summer to say the least.
When Palm's (NASDAQ:PALM) software division PalmSource shipped the gold master of its latest operating system (Palm OS 5) to licensees on June 15, many were faced with a conundrum: how to deal with a new ARM microprocessor architecture instead of the DragonBall configurations they've been used to.
The problem, say developers, is that since the operating system is running as ARM-native code, often times it won't allow you to patch traps using legacy 68K code. This is because the mode-switch at each system call would be significant and would wreak havoc with the carefully-crafted "application" versus "operating system" division that the 68K emulator has to maintain.
