AROS Research Operating System

AROS Research Operating System is an open source project that tries to develop a portable and completely free computer OS that is 100% compatible with the proprietary AmigaOS operating system.

Initially, AROS Research Operating System was designed as a direct reimplementation of AmigaOS, but now it includes several attractive features that do not exist in upstream AmigaOS operating system.

What is AmigaOS?

Initially developed by Commodore International, AmigaOS is a proprietary computer operating system oriented towards desktop users and specifically designed for the Amiga personal computer. It’s a single-user OS powered by a preemptive multitasking kernel and comprised of AmigaDOS disk OS, an abstraction of the Amiga's hardware, the Intuition windowing system API and the Workbench desktop file manager.

The project’s goals

The main goals of the AROS Research Operating System project is to be fully compatible with version 3.1 of the AmigaOS operating system, support as many processors and instruction set architectures as possible (see the section below for details), become binary compatible with Amiga, as well as to be source compatible with other hardware platforms.

Additionally, it aims to improve the default functionality of AmigaOS, and run as a standalone operating system, which can boot straight from the local disk drive, or to be emulated on top of an existing operating system, which can be used to build software for Amiga.

Under the hood, availability and supported architectures

AROS Research Operating System is written in C and can be easily designed as lightweight, flexible and efficient desktop operating system. It supports many architectures, including x86, Alpha, PowerPC, HPPA, Sparc, and others.

Daily builds of the AROS Research Operating System project are always available for download on Softoware, free of charge, as bz2 compressed archives, which contain all the necessary files to deploy the OS on a disk drive and boot it.