Controversy
Haage & Partner, an Amiga software and hardware manufacturer (which also created AmigaOS 3.9), developed a competing kernel to PowerUP called WarpUP, which they claimed would work around the context switching problem, a claim which would be bitterly challenged by Phase5. 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. WarpOS versions up to V7 were wrappers added around Phase5's PowerUP kernel but starting from version 8 it was its own PPC kernel running alongside AmigaOS and was renamed WarpOS.
As PowerUP was on the EPROM of the boards and Phase5 could not run at the same time with WarpOS, it had to be deactivated by a small software tool. As H&P did not have access to the EPROM, the tool had to make assumptions about the PowerUP kernel and naturally this broke in updated versions. This led to open accusations by WarpOS advocates and by the author, Sam Jordan, that Phase5 were intentionally trying to prevent WarpOS running on their boards. Phase5 also claimed that Haage & Partner abused a free developer board gifted to them to launch this competing kernel (although free, WarpOS was supported almost exclusively by H&P's commercial StormC++ compiler), and that they had reverse-engineered PowerUP to do so. H&P pointed out that it was unavoidable as long Phase5 refused to allow users to choose what kernel to put on the board EPROM, claiming that the PowerUP kernel was essential for initialising the boards on boot and erasing them would simply render the boards useless.
Worse still, users were originally only able to run one of these kernels, resulting in much duplication of effort between competing developers determined to use one or the other, often with two version of software being developed independently. 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.
The farce generated produced a great number of hurriedly ported, often semi-functional ports of open source software from Windows, often just to "one up" the other side. Steffen Haeuser (who had gained notoriety by declaring, "ELF is a monster !!!", referring to the ELF fileformat) 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.
The impasse between the competing systems was eventually ended by a PowerUP wrapper for WarpOS by Franke Wille, which allowed users to run PowerUP software on their WarpOS systems.
Read more about this topic: Warp OS
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