Understanding and Optimization of OS 4.1 for Classics

[Calgor]

Part of the reason for certain cards not working is due to the well publicised DMA workaround employed by Elbox in OS3.9 not being able to work in the design and implementation of OS4.x.

How to determine which cards need DMA and will not work, or in fact would work but just need (compatible) drivers I am not sure. I can only go by the compatibility list on the AmigaOS website.

In addition to the Deneb, the Subway is listed as compatible, although I am not sure if it has been tried off, for example, the X-Surf clockport.

[danbeaver]

I even believe that the Algor is compatibile; not read anything about the Norway or Highway. However they are out of stock in Spain, Germany, and the UK. They rarely go up for sale on the "Bay" sites while you can pick up a generic USB (pci) card for 10 something. If a USB solution for OS 4.1 was available for sale I wouldn't have mentioned it. But doesn't seem that the sound, NIC, SATA, and video cards are readily available but the USB Is cover by products from one specific company that is no longer producing any of these products

Dan

[danbeaver]

Folks,

The 15K HDD came in and exposed my SCSI Bus termination weakness; for the few moments that it worked (imperfectly) I got amazing transfers, but soon the drive errors were constant. As best I can find out, I was not terminating my SCSI Bus with an "active, Wide, and single ended" terminator. I seem to have gotten by with a narrow & single ended for the past few months, but no more. I think it was the new drive's U320 status as cause. So I will report back in a week or two if it (an Active/Wide/Single-Ended Terminator) works.

On another front, I now can boot somewhat quickly to OS 4.1 from a silent CF card hung on the the end of the A4000T's IDE bus without the SCSI->IDE ACard. I also set up Icons via IconX to automatically switch between printing across my home network to my Color Laser vs my Inkjet printers under OS 4.1. With a little work I got MiamiDX to work under OS 3.9 so I can used the same Icons to swith back and forth between the two. In this quest I found that NOTHING supports printing on any Printer Unit other than 1; you can waste all your time setting up different unit numbers for different printers, and no software product cares. Hence the IconX solution. It just copies the diferent envronmental (ENV & ENVARC) settings for the different printers with different IP addresses. I use the lpr.device.

I do have some lingering questions (aka "Dreams") about the the future I came across in my first thread:
1) The Hyperion's OS 4.1 is begging for a REAL manual, not a FAQ.
2) There is a great Samba for Idiots Amiga site, but they don't have a "Troubleshooting" section for when it fails (yeah, Amiga Explorer does not get around the problem either).
3) It would be "really nice" to have a Pre-compiler/Compiler for 68K programs to PPC, as JIT has to have situations were it can't just stop and say, "Whoa partner that ain't right." You guys remember Blitz! Basic and "the like?"
4) I would like to have "PureBasic" or something similar make native PPC programs. PureBasic is now a free download and a good replacement for True Basic.
5) Wouldn't it be nice if the Sonnet Crescendo/7200 G3 PCI card (still available for 30 cubic-feet of that monitary stuff for a 500MHz G3 directly from them) could plug into a PCI slot and add some speed? The card has 3 slots for up to 384Mg of memory. It's set at 5V, at least it want 5V Mac memory which is pretty cheap. I read a discussion on Amiga.something.com|org|net that was do do one from scratch, but here is one that needs some boot code, etcetera-stuff to add in the memory and transfer program execution perameters.

Comments?

-Dan

PS, changing resolutions of the graphic output does not free up RAM on my system; the MAS Player device seems to have no impact on OS 4.1's CPU use (vs AmigaAMP3). Once all is said and done, OS 4.1 on the Classic is fairly quick, responsive, and works well; I do most of my work under it now.

[danbeaver]

My mistake! Changing resolution modes does change free ram: I gained almost 10 Meg's of RAM by switching to "native" modes, which can either be emulated on the Radeo Card or via my AGA/Indivision MK II. I hate a small screen, but it does free ram.

The CyberStrorm SCSI device is oddly picky; it hated the U320 Fuji drive (15k) and a Seagate U160 HDD (10k), giving up the Ghost just after it allowed formatting. I do now have a properly and fully terminated SCSI bus chain.

Good news on the software install side of things: Voyager 3.32 installed and works nicely (I got the Netconnect3 CD and now have a key file). I found the intuitionbase web site and found a good compatibility list with some nice themes. I wrote a tutorial on use of the MAS PLAYER mp3 device in OS 4.1 ( and 3.9), and have begun to jot down notes on solving other problems. I compacted a Kicklayout-A4000T file to only the used devices and deleted out the comments; this MAY same load time and some memory, and I've been assigning programs, backups, and caches to my large SATA HDD which sits on my sii3114ide PCI card (the one I got from Amaz__.com for around 12 leaves of US lettuce). Finally for the present time, I'm using a USB Ethernet dongle to access the net at very improved speeds over the RTL8029. Again it boils down to having USB access which I believe should be supported on an inexpensive generic PCI Card -- like an NEC chipset card. Not only on E3B devices (I luckily have a Deneb).

Folks ought to check out the UltimatePPC.nl web site

-Dan

[DarrenHD]

My mistake! Changing resolution modes does change free ram: I gained almost 10 Meg's of RAM by switching to "native" modes, which can either be emulated on the Radeo Card or via my AGA/Indivision MK II. I hate a small screen, but it does free ram.

The CyberStrorm SCSI device is oddly picky; it hated the U320 Fuji drive (15k) and a Seagate U160 HDD (10k), giving up the Ghost just after it allowed formatting. I do now have a properly and fully terminated SCSI bus chain.

Good news on the software install side of things: Voyager 3.32 installed and works nicely (I got the Netconnect3 CD and now have a key file). I found the intuitionbase web site and found a good compatibility list with some nice themes. I wrote a tutorial on use of the MAS PLAYER mp3 device in OS 4.1 ( and 3.9), and have begun to jot down notes on solving other problems. I compacted a Kicklayout-A4000T file to only the used devices and deleted out the comments; this MAY same load time and some memory, and I've been assigning programs, backups, and caches to my large SATA HDD which sits on my sii3114ide PCI card (the one I got from Amaz__.com for around 12 leaves of US lettuce). Finally for the present time, I'm using a USB Ethernet dongle to access the net at very improved speeds over the RTL8029. Again it boils down to having USB access which I believe should be supported on an inexpensive generic PCI Card -- like an NEC chipset card. Not only on E3B devices (I luckily have a Deneb).

Folks ought to check out the UltimatePPC.nl web site

-Dan

The problem with the cheap PCI USB cards is that they all require DMA - something which we don't have over the Mediator in AmigaOS 4.1.

Deneb is your best bet - I can pull 1MB/sec with the USB ethernet card I have.

For SWAP, it's kind of a toss up between CS PPC scsi drive vs. ZorRAM. with the ZorRAM, as mentioned, latency is lower, so it can sometimes be faster....but with the CS PPC SCSI you are getting DMA so the cpu usage is lower and if you have a fast SCSI drive it can be the preferred method, especially if you are running other things while swapping. Having a separate SWAP partition on a separate SCSI disk might be the ultimate solution, especially if your primary disk is busy.

The ZorRAM (or DKB 3128) will ALWAYS be the first device used, for example if you have ZorRAM and a SWAP partition on the CS PPC SCSI. We ordered it that way in the kernel. You can disable the ZorRAM using a bootloader command line option in your startup-sequence.

Use the "memstat" command at the shell to check the order and status of your swap devices to see if they were used.

I mentioned this in the Classic FAQ.

Darren

[danbeaver]

DarrinHD,

You are, of course correct; however ZorRam is not cheap and like the Deneb, will be sold out and impossible to find.

I didn't know that the PCI USB card was DMA. I assume that only one (1) device may be DMA (the CS SCSI) and that there is way to add any other devices. I assume too that you can't PIO the driver for the PCI USB?

Dan

[DarrenHD]

DarrinHD,

You are, of course correct; however ZorRam is not cheap and like the Deneb, will be sold out and impossible to find.

I didn't know that the PCI USB card was DMA. I assume that only one (1) device may be DMA (the CS SCSI) and that there is way to add any other devices. I assume too that you can't PIO the driver for the PCI USB?

Dan

Unforunately you can't as the actual chips do not support PIO modes, so I'm afraid a Deneb is your only solution. Too bad they were discontinued.

[danbeaver]

Well I guess that another Deneb-like device needs to be developed!

Dan

[JurassicC]

Folks,


I do have some lingering questions (aka "Dreams") about the the future I came across in my first thread:
1) The Hyperion's OS 4.1 is begging for a REAL manual, not a FAQ.
2) There is a great Samba for Idiots Amiga site, but they don't have a "Troubleshooting" section for when it fails (yeah, Amiga Explorer does not get around the problem either).
3) It would be "really nice" to have a Pre-compiler/Compiler for 68K programs to PPC, as JIT has to have situations were it can't just stop and say, "Whoa partner that ain't right." You guys remember Blitz! Basic and "the like?"
4) I would like to have "PureBasic" or something similar make native PPC programs. PureBasic is now a free download and a good replacement for True Basic.
5) Wouldn't it be nice if the Sonnet Crescendo/7200 G3 PCI card (still available for 30 cubic-feet of that monitary stuff for a 500MHz G3 directly from them) could plug into a PCI slot and add some speed? The card has 3 slots for up to 384Mg of memory. It's set at 5V, at least it want 5V Mac memory which is pretty cheap. I read a discussion on Amiga.something.com|org|net that was do do one from scratch, but here is one that needs some boot code, etcetera-stuff to add in the memory and transfer program execution perameters.

Comments?

1) Agreed but you can also refer to sys:documentation
2) If you are trying to connect to windows vista or 7 your out of luck i'm affraid our samba stops at XP, but if you start a samba thread i'm sure you'll get some help!
5) It would require a new kernel unless support is added its not going to work.

Perhaps support is something E3B, Elbox, AmigaKIT or A-EON could pay Hyperion to do as I can't see it happening with out it.

You would need a 68K program to startup the sonnet card cpu and copy uboot into it and shutdown the Amiga.
You wouldn't even need a 68K or Phase5 PPC accelerator the onboard 020 / 030 could do it.
It could then boot of PCI based Sata card.


Once it booted and took over I guess you would loose all access to the "Classic Amiga" It would be Sonnet controlling the Mediator.
I guess you could poll the Amiga Hardware for keyboard and mouse events.
The 8MB window wouldn't be a problem anymore and you could do DMA transfers from the sonnet to the PCI slots.
So you might be able to use an NEC based USB2 card for Keyboard and mouse.

I would expect you would have low end SAM performance but for price of OS4.1 and $40 for a sonnet + MAC RAM Price (Obviously you need a pci solution in your amiga)

However IIRC Sonnet needs 3.3V so Its Mediator TX and SX only and a hardware mod to 3.3V to 5V only Mediators.

BTW the card has been made to Initialise, there was a thread on Amiga.org circa 2010

[danbeaver]

WOW! That's a lot of information. Thank you for the reply.

I have all the SYS:Documentation stored as chapters in a RTF document (300+ pages) which is searchable, however much is unorganized, inconsistent and requires an older Amiga DOS manual for explanation and usage format. I'm the kind of person who likes to sit with the documents sitting on the desk in front of me, not on a screen.

Yes, I am trying to access my Win 7 office computer. I guess someone should add that to the Samba for Idiots guide; haven't read that before. Again thanks!

I completely understand that the DMA issue was a logical choice by the programmers and that a kernel paradigm change is no small matter, but I found that out by exploring my install (see previous posts). There is a lot of information hidden in-between the lines there. I just wanted to find out the "how and why" of the issue; mostly because I have two A4000T's and only one has a Deneb (an excellant device, but unobtainable if my main system goes down).

The Sonnet question came up after reading about SharkPPC vapor-ware. I picked a Sonnet up last year with 384K RAM (5V) as a lark. I was thinking it could take care of CPU intensive tasks (Co-Processor?), not running the operating system. You have obviously thought about it as well. I'll look for that thread.

Thank you for adding to my knowledge of the OS, it is my primary system and I am facinated by the fresh direction it is going.

Dan