RISC OS 5 Overview

RISC OS 5 is the latest version of the fast and robust Operating System designed for ARM processors. Unlike earlier versions of RISC OS it runs entirely in the ARM's 32-bit mode making it suitable for the latest ARM processors such as Intel XScale, ARM9 and ARM10 based devices.

In addition, RISC OS 5 introduces support for PCI expansion cards, USB devices, UCS (Unicode) fonts, graphics acceleration, dual serial ports and high speed expansion podules. It also implements a Hardware Abstraction Layer to enable it to be easily ported to new hardware without making any changes to the RISC OS kernel.

RISC OS 5 was developed to support and take advantage of the new IYONIX pc - it will not be available for older machines.

On the IYONIX pc RISC OS 5 is installed in a 4MByte Flash ROM device which can easily be updated using software updates available over the Internet. The ROM image is copied to fast DDR RAM at boot time to increase the performance, but the computer can still be used without a hard disc.

The pages in the RISC OS 5 section of this site describe some of the new RISC OS 5 features in detail.