Author Topic: VirtualBox v5.0.51 Testing  (Read 61400 times)

Doug Clark

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OS4 kernel?
« Reply #15 on: April 14, 2018, 11:00:36 pm »
Valery has talked multiple times about the OS4 kernel, and I have seen it mentioned in some other places also.

What do you guys all think about the OS4 kernel? Is it available to install? It is installable - by mere mortals such as myself?

What are the downsides of switching to OS4?

Doug

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: OS4 kernel?
« Reply #16 on: April 15, 2018, 12:20:46 am »
Hey Doug,

Valery has talked multiple times about the OS4 kernel, and I have seen it mentioned in some other places also.

What do you guys all think about the OS4 kernel? Is it available to install? It is installable - by mere mortals such as myself?...

I have tried multiple releases of OS4 kernel, each time though I end up having a hard trap right after PMSHELL is initialized. The 201 SMP AOS kernel on the other hand sails right through this w/o any problems.

Initially when I was trying to get this working an individual on our forum (maybe  Valery?) offered to help and troubleshoot further, but it required me to setup a kernel debug environment (com port connection to another machine) so we could capture what's happening during boot. I unfortunately never got around to it, no handy machines to get this configured, etc, etc, subsequently I have not been able to go any further with it.

Some comments though:

1) DOCUMENTATION - early releases were terrible, ad-hoc TXT files here and there, the situation is much today...BUT...there are still multiple modules which although available for d/l one really has no idea if you should try deploying them or not...for example various AMD/SNAP/SDD drivers, DLLs and patches...hard to tell what these are for, and so difficult for someone like myself to attempt to debug this further on the single machine that I have to provide the developers better feedback

2) FUNCTIONALITY - the overall solution seems to be more of a THIS or THAT...meaning, go OS4 all the way, or stay OS2, they were previously providing patches for ACPI < 3.23.01 (I think) but nothing is available for anything newer, so whatever the benefits may be of the new kernel, one does not appear to be able to use them with the officially recognized ACPI support modules

I hope they keep on improving the product, it has real promise and seems to have addressed some key pain-points (heck, the ability to run VBox with VT-x / AMD-V enabled is huge in my opinion).

Dave Yeo

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Re: VirtualAddressLimit
« Reply #17 on: April 15, 2018, 01:13:54 am »
I have been following the posting on this thread, and the VirtualBox problems - especially the parts about starting up vbox and settings in CONFIG.SYS

Yesterday I set VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT=2048, installed and started VBOX multiple times. I tried to create a new virtual machine using a *.VHD from VirtualPC. Which was not successful. But I successfully started VirtualBox.exe multiple times, and attempted to start the new VM I created multiple times.

This morning when I booted up I received the error

Unable to allocate memory for mode info cache!
Fatal error in driver. Use Alt-Ctrl-Del to reboot.

I finally resoved this by changing my VAL back to its original setting, set VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT=1536

I could then boot up the machine, start VirtualBox.exe, and create a new virtual machine using a Windows XP CD.

I also experience an error after VirtualBox.exe is running, when I start the VM. If I wait the 15 seconds suggested by Mark (I believe) the VM will start.

I am running ARCAOS 5.02. SNAP with dual head.

Hi Doug. How much memory does your video card have? Possibly that is why you need such a low virtualaddresslimit setting. IIRC, there is a way to lower usage, I think Dariusz has experience in that.

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: VirtualAddressLimit
« Reply #18 on: April 15, 2018, 01:47:14 am »
Doug,

Hi Doug. How much memory does your video card have? Possibly that is why you need such a low virtualaddresslimit setting. IIRC, there is a way to lower usage, I think Dariusz has experience in that.

...follow-up to Dave's post above.

I am using SNAP, my ATI X850 PE card has 256MB on-board memory, but I have this lowered to just 32MB to free up the remaining memory, otherwise SNAP will grab that from the available OS/2 pool.

If you are also using SNAP use the following command @ CLI: 'gaoption vidmem 32'. To confirm that this is active issue the following command 'gaoption show', which will show you all SNAP options, you are specifically looking for the following output (in-between ==> x <== below):

Code: [Select]
Options for ATI Radeon X850 Series (device 0):

  Invert .................. Off
  Rotation ................ Off
  Flipped ................. Off
  Reduced DVI Timings...... Off
  Prefer 16 bit per pixel.. On
  Prefer 32 bit per pixel.. On
  Compressed Framebuffer... On
  Allow DDC BIOS........... On
  PCI bus mastering........ On
  Video memory packets..... On
  Hardware acceleration.... Full
  Multi Head Display....... Off
  VESA DPVL Mode........... Off

Global options for all devices:

  Force VBE Fallback ...... Off
  Force VGA Fallback ...... Off
  Allow non-certified ..... On
  Disable write combining . Off
  Use BIOS for LCD panel... Auto
==>  Video Memory Limit....... 32 Mb <===
  Shared AGP memory size... 4096 Kb
  Use system memory driver. Off
  Disable DDC detection.... Off
  Enable AGP FastWrite..... Off
  Maximum AGP data rate.... 8X
  Virtual Display.......... Off

I am running VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT=2560 on my machine, 3072 boots as well, but I have to seriously downsize the HPFS386 cache, which just doesn't make sense for me.

Valery Sedletski

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Re: VirtualBox v5.0.51 Testing
« Reply #19 on: April 15, 2018, 01:48:46 am »
2Doug Clark: VAL=1536 or 2048 may be too small for running VBox! You need VAL=3072. Please reread what has been written in this thread (and another one VBox thread) carefully. You don't need to switch off AMD-V/VT-x in BIOS settings -- only in VBox settings! Your system supports VT-x/AMD-V, but your kernel is not. That's because it is enabled on your system. My system does not support AMD-V, because it is an early Athlon 64 system, so it is turned off by default on my system. So please, turn the checkbox off.

You'd better not start old VPC VM's in VBox, better create a new one, because it has different hardware emulated.

> Unable to allocate memory for mode info cache!
> Fatal error in driver. Use Alt-Ctrl-Del to reboot.

Never seen this. Looks like you have insufficient kernel memory. Are you sure you have correct VAL and decreased JFS cache and THREADS/PROCESSES accordingly? Do you have EARLYMEMINIT=TRUE in CONFIG.SYS BTW?

> I also experience an error after VirtualBox.exe is running, when I start the VM. If I wait the 15 seconds suggested by Mark (I believe) the VM will start.

Why do you need this? You have -1018 error too?

> Does networking work in Vbox?

It works, via NAT, and via OS2TAP driver (but the latter is broken). NAT should work ok. Yes, probably, you have some network configuration error in WinXP. If your OS/2 network connection works, then it should woork in VBox too.
« Last Edit: April 15, 2018, 02:54:11 am by Valery Sedletski »

R.M. Klippstein

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Re: VirtualBox v5.0.51 Testing
« Reply #20 on: April 15, 2018, 02:20:23 am »
Hi Doug, Here's my 25 cents worth fwiw, I've been using OS4 kernel for close to two years with next to no problems, entirely on AMD Multi-Processor systems with both Panorama & Snap. I've screwed up setting it up a couple of times but once its working seems to be trouble free.

klipp

Valery Sedletski

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Re: VirtualBox v5.0.51 Testing
« Reply #21 on: April 15, 2018, 02:24:56 am »
2Dave Yeo: Yes, good note! Modern videocards have too much on-board RAM. Mine, for example has 256 MB (it is Radeon 9600 XT), so I decreased memory mapping to 16 MB in SNAP, which is sufficient for 2D acceleration and my FullHD screen to work. This will greatly economize the kernel address space. The key for VBox to work is to get more available address space to userland (hence, increase VAL to 3072). But increasing VAL requires decreasing JFS cache, if it is too much, and THREADS (to e.g., 511)/PROCESSES (to e.g., 128). Also, you need to control how much free space remained in the kernel arena, with Theseus (see the end of System->Kernel Information->Kernel Memory usage report):

Quote
allocated committed   present  resident  Totals
 --------  --------  --------  --------
 38133000  12D93000  12D15000  111E3000  Total (in bytes)
   918732    308812    308308    280460  Total (in Kbytes)
  897.199   301.574   301.082   273.887  Total (in Mbytes)
< End of THESEUS4 (v 4.001.00) output @ 3:01:58 on 15/4/2018 >

You can see that here is 897.199 of 1024 MB is occupied. So, 100+ MB is free, which is sufficient. I have VAL=3072, PROCESSES=156, THREADS=511, and JFS cache set to 128 MB explicitly:

VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT=3072
EARLYMEMINIT=TRUE
DLLBASING=OFF
PROCESSES=156
THREADS=511
ifs=d:\os2\jfs.ifs /autocheck:* /cache:128000 /lazy:8,60,5 /p1

PS: Also, you can try to decrease Video memory used  by your video card in BIOS, if you have such setting (in case you have an integrated video card).

2Dariusz Piatkowski: Documentation is good enough, at least, most needed configuration options are described ok. You can ask develpers, if in troubles, they are on this forum and on IRC.

Installation is simple, as any other OS/2 kernel. You have to copy kernel and os2ldr instead IBM's ones, or install QSINIT, which is better to use. Both QSINIT and OS/4 os2ldr support multibooting several kernels. (But there is a number of drivers supplied with the kernel, which should be copied to \os2\boot. These drivers have no name conflicts with existing drivers. AlexT wrote a short HOWTO for quick setup, which is included in latest kernels. Also, there is doscalls1.dll which is optional. It is compatible with IBM's version). Also, there is a multibooting feature of OS/4 os2ldr (and QSINIT works the same time, I use it). So, you can boot multiple kernels from the os2ldr menu (it is better described in QSINIT documentation). Also, OS/4 has built-in CONFIG.SYS editor (activated with Alt-E in loader menu), which is handy if you need to REM out or add something temporarily. It has a good logging feature (a central system log, available for reading via a COM port, or via "copy KERNLOG$ kernlog.txt" after the system booted successfully). Very handy for developers, to debug drivers. Also, there are some enhancements, like hi-res HPET timer support (no hi-res timer bug in apps like Mozilla, like ACPI.PSD has), support for CPU rendez-vous (running the code on all CPU's in parallel), which is used in VBox for VT-x/AMD-V support etc., etc.

Regarding ACPI, yes, OS/4 devs got boring patching each time every new version of ACPI.PSD, so they gave up. But they created their own ACPI module (which is not yet released, it is available for testers, and those who is not too lazy to debug it to make it working, with devs' help). So, ACPI.PSD should be not a problem too.
« Last Edit: April 15, 2018, 02:46:54 am by Valery Sedletski »

David Graser

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Re: VirtualBox v5.0.51 Testing
« Reply #22 on: April 15, 2018, 08:44:13 am »
Hi Doug, Here's my 25 cents worth fwiw, I've been using OS4 kernel for close to two years with next to no problems, entirely on AMD Multi-Processor systems with both Panorama & Snap. I've screwed up setting it up a couple of times but once its working seems to be trouble free.

klipp

This may seem like a dumb question, but I really don't know which kernel you are referring to when saying OS4 kernel.  Is it the Warp 4 kernel, the eCS kernel, or the kernel that comes with ArcaOS?

OS4User

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Re: VirtualBox v5.0.51 Testing
« Reply #23 on: April 15, 2018, 09:37:20 am »
... I really don't know which kernel you are referring to when saying OS4 kernel...


here is some info https://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php/topic,324.0.html

Mark Szkolnicki

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Re: VirtualBox v5.0.51 Testing
« Reply #24 on: April 15, 2018, 07:12:17 pm »
2Doug!

I have been following the posting on this thread, and the VirtualBox problems - especially the parts about starting up vbox and settings in CONFIG.SYS

Yesterday I set VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT=2048, installed and started VBOX multiple times. I tried to create a new virtual machine using a *.VHD from VirtualPC. Which was not successful. But I successfully started VirtualBox.exe multiple times, and attempted to start the new VM I created multiple times.

This morning when I booted up I received the error

Unable to allocate memory for mode info cache!
Fatal error in driver. Use Alt-Ctrl-Del to reboot.

I finally resoved this by changing my VAL back to its original setting, set VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT=1536

I could then boot up the machine, start VirtualBox.exe, and create a new virtual machine using a Windows XP CD.

I also experience an error after VirtualBox.exe is running, when I start the VM. If I wait the 15 seconds suggested by Mark (I believe) the VM will start.

I am running ARCAOS 5.02. SNAP with dual head. I ran the YUM install lines from the readme.os2 from version 5.0.6 and I do have the
SET LIBCX_HIGHMEM=2
in my CONFIG.SYS from reading the other posts, although I do not think I have that experimental LIBC package installed.

I also noticed, which I think Valery has now seen, that the default for new VMs has  VT-x / AMD-V enabled.

I did not see a way to turn off AMD-V in my BIOS.


Heh Doug!

Regarding networking, its does work using NAT, which seems to be the default setting.

 I've been using it to download files from the other machines on my network and also from the internet, as I updated all files to the latest level on Windows XP after I connected. A lot of people don't realize it, but you can still upgrade Windows XP from the windows update website, despite service ending in 2014 - there are a couple of things you have to do within windows, but that does work perfectly once those are done.

If its a new copy of the Windows XP VM, you probably have to ensure that your computer is first recognized on your network. Once done, it operates like any other computer. If you need some tips setting that up, let me know.
 
Regarding LIBCX - Look in ANPM (ARCA's package download manager, to see what version your using - the latest regular is LIBCX is 0.6.0-1. The experimental version referred to is 0.6.1-2 and you must have access to the netlabs-exp experimental repository (can be installed through the "Avaiable choIce on ANPM

M
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Mark Szkolnicki

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Re: VirtualBox v5.0.51 Testing
« Reply #25 on: April 15, 2018, 07:48:22 pm »
HI Doug!

Had to leave for a few minutes (busy weekend) so I continuance from my previous post.

Regarding LIBCX Part 2 - SET LIBCX_HIGHMEM=2 does not seem to do any harm of there when LIBCX 0.6.0 is installed, although its found to be required for 0.6.1-2 by various people, including me, for VBOX usage.

Regarding AMD-V - There is no AMD-V setting in BIOS AFAIK - I believe it is a virtual setting, which supports aspects of your hardware through the kernel. It uses those aspects the accelerate operation of the VM though the kernel. Simply go to SETTINGS | SYSTEM in VBOX, with the VM you want to change, go to the ACCELERATION tab and uncheck enable VT-X / AMD-V and thats it.

I've found VBOX in testing to be very stable so far, but, like you, I've potentially forgot many of the set-up items I need to do to get the vanilla versions of these various operating systems in VM going.

BTW, I've had limited time to test in the last few days due to corporate year end at the moment, but tried a couple of things:

I tried the MACHINE | CLONE function on Thursday night. VBOX is a lot more complex and feature rich program than VPC, and this feature creates a clone of the VM highlighted. It seems VBOX has an ID number for each VDI it creates, and trying to install another copy of an OS by simply copying the file can cause errors. It also may cause some problems, if you want to take the VDI and install it on another machine.

MACHINE | CLONE brings up two consecutive windows (see attached) to create the clone - creating a full clone seems to be the correct setting to get a VDI you can move around to other machines.

Running that on my upgraded Windows XP VM spiked the CPU usage to about 95% and took about 1 hour and 45 minutes to complete. I was running SeaMonkey occassionally during the time period, but sometimes found some functions extremely slow. Haven't tried the cloned VM but it does now appear in the VBOX window, if I want to test it.

Best!

M

Vincit Que Se Vincit - "He Who Conquers Self Succeeds"

Mark Szkolnicki

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Re: VirtualBox v5.0.51 Testing
« Reply #26 on: April 15, 2018, 08:27:34 pm »
I'm currently waiting for a full copy of Windows 7 to arrive so I can install and test it in a VM, but decided, since I has an upgrade copy of Windows 7 lying around, to see if I could install one of my extra copies of Windows XP into the Windows 7 VM created.

It was interesting, as the Windows XP system started loading, and then exited with the blue screen attached.

Tried this with two separate authentic copies of Windows XP and got exactly the same screen

It seems that each VM is not just an optimum setting environment for the specified OS - it requires the exact OS to be installed. Interesting.

Anyone else ever try this, just for fun, to see what would happen, and get the same result?

M
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Mark Szkolnicki

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Re: Networking in Vbox
« Reply #27 on: April 15, 2018, 08:44:23 pm »
Heh Doug!


It has been awhile since I setup networking in Windows XP so this is probably operator error on my part.

BTW: VBOX looks pretty good so far - with my very limited usage at this point.

Doug

Yes things have come a long way, Doug. How much we forget.

Remember the old days - Compuserve? Golden Compass? v2.0 then Warp 3 and Warp 4? 14, 28.8 then 56K modems?

A lot of new faces and a lot of new equipment, and the world goes on as the grey at our temples continues to grow ................

M
Vincit Que Se Vincit - "He Who Conquers Self Succeeds"

ivan

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Re: VirtualBox v5.0.51 Testing
« Reply #28 on: April 16, 2018, 01:28:23 am »
Hi Mark,

Are you trying to setup an OS/2 vbox with win 7 running in it and then trying to setup a vbox instance in that win 7 to run XP?  I don't think that will work and is the reason for message you show.

As far as I know vbox will only run one guest OS at a time although it should be possible to run several vbox instances at once on the host machine.  Note I said should because I'm not sure we can with OS/2 as the host machine.

Mark Szkolnicki

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Re: VirtualBox v5.0.51 Testing
« Reply #29 on: April 16, 2018, 04:11:57 am »
Hi Mark,

Are you trying to setup an OS/2 vbox with win 7 running in it and then trying to setup a vbox instance in that win 7 to run XP?  I don't think that will work and is the reason for message you show.

As far as I know vbox will only run one guest OS at a time although it should be possible to run several vbox instances at once on the host machine.  Note I said should because I'm not sure we can with OS/2 as the host machine.

Hi Ivan!

That was not the intention.

I was trying to install a Windows 7 update, that I happened to have available, given that I'm still waiting for a full version of Windows 7 to arrive,

The update had to be installed over an existing previous version of Windows. I thought I'd try to install Windows XP in the Windows 7 VM, then install the Windows 7 Update version over it. Obviously that did not work, but if you don't try, you never learn.

Hope that makes sense and Best of the rest of today to you!

M
Vincit Que Se Vincit - "He Who Conquers Self Succeeds"