Under the Hood

What makes the BeOS so fast and efficient? For starters, the BeOS cast off the chains of "legacy code", freeing it from the restrictions of ancient computing methods.

In their place was put an architecture specifically designed for handling intensive tasks, such as digital audio and video. The building blocks include:

• Symmetric multiprocessing - Take advantage of two, four or more processors in a single machine.

• Pervasive multithreading - Multithreading takes large tasks, such as applications, and breaks them down into a myriad of smaller tasks. Pervasive multithreading means that this approach is used throughout the BeOS, from the kernel, through the graphics and I/O systems, and through BeOS applications.

• Preemptive multitasking - The BeOS works on and rapidly switches between dozens, often hundreds, of smaller tasks. These tasks can be deployed on a single processor, providing a smooth multitasking environment, or across any number of processors in a multiprocessor system.

• 64-bit journaling file system - This enables extremely large volumes and files, of terabyte size and more, enough to handle even raw uncompressed, high-resolution video and audio -- the foundation for high-quality editing systems. The Be file system goes even further, providing database capabilities allowing the storage of multiple attributes and indexes along with files.

• Object-oriented APIs - The BeOS API makes programming easy and efficient.

Okay, lets see what all that power does for you.