How much of the speedup is due to a different user space vs Linux (the kernel)?

How much faster is the AROS kernel compared to Linux?

It's hard to measure.

AROS is not AmigaOS, but it's a FOSS recreation of AmigaOS which started out on x86. It reached a usable level some years ago, and it's been used in some of the projects that have launched modern Arm-based hardware Amiga emulators, such as the THEA500:

https://retrogames.biz/products/thea500-mini/

And the A1200-NG:

https://www.a1200.com/index.php/the-a1200-ng/

Now it has reached some of those goals, the developers are branching out. In recent years, there have been...

• a Live USB key

• an x86-64-bit version

• an SMP version

And so on.

But bear in mind what AmigaOS is: This is an OS which appeared the decade before Linux (or NetBSD/FreeBSD).

Linux is a protected-mode 32-bit multiuser OS, which expects to run from a hard disk, and even when new really wanted a few MB of RAM. It has no native graphics, which is why today the X11 graphics system is being removed and replaced with a new one, Wayland.

AmigaOS is from the previous generation of computers. On the original Amiga 1000 it ran in 256 kB of RAM on a machine with only a single floppy drive. It really shone on a machine with 2-4 MB of RAM and twin 800kB floppies; a hard disk was an expensive luxury upgrade.

The core of Amiga OS was 3 tiny components:

• Exec, a minute (13 kB) message-passing kernel by Carl Sassenrath

• AmigaDOS, a port of TRIPOS, a message-passing multitasking single-user OS written in BCPL, the typeless ancestor of C, ported by the late Tim King -- I just wrote an obituary for him:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/18/tim-king-ami...

• Intuition, a windowing library

All 3 fit on a single 800 kB floppy with room for apps.

This is an OS that's something like 1% to 10% of the size that Linux was in the early 1990s and which is focused on being a single-user multitasking GUI OS. No networking, no server functionality, no virtual memory, no hardware memory management, no memory protection (all processes in 1 memory space), but heavily optimised for raw performance.

Linux got usable when CD-ROM caught on: you needed a few hundred MB of space to fit the OS onto 1 distribution medium.

AmigaOS fit onto a few floppies: it needed a few MB.

This is a much smaller simpler OS. And yes it crashed, a lot.

But in 1985 it was the first ever multitasking OS for personal computers which let people do full-colour graphics, stereo sound, in multiple apps running at the same time... when the Mac supported 1- bit mono graphics at 384*256 pixels, and ran on a single 400 kB floppy.

AROS is not the same OS. It is more like a FOSS clone of what AmigaOS grew up into after 3 major releases, and modernised.

What I'm getting at is that this is not the same sort of beast as Linux or a BSD.

They are passenger cruisers which can take a few thousand people in great luxury across an ocean.

Minix or the GNU Hurd are a bus: a big transcontinental tour bus with a bathroom and a kitchenette.

AmigaOS is a bicycle.