Hardware Compatibility Wishlist for 2022

[Andreas Schnellbacher]

One thing is to set the size of the swap file as fairly large (1GB?) as growing it can cause problems.

Thanks, I have set it now to 1 GB and will report:

Code: [Select]

SWAPPATH=C:\OS2\SYSTEM 2048 1048576
When that works better, it's time to use the RAM disk.

[Doug Clark]

Are you guys saying that AOS on newer systems with more than 4 GB of ram installed cannot utilitize all 4 GB of RAM for the system?

 

 

[Dave Yeo]

For some systems, yes. It varies but some systems have holes (used by the hardware I believe) in the memory address map creating the problem that Andreas has, only a couple of GB's accessible in the lower 4GB's of address space.

[OS4User]

Are you guys saying that AOS on newer systems with more than 4 GB of ram installed cannot utilitize all 4 GB of RAM for the system?

OS/2 only works with 32-bit physical addresses (kernel and drivers). So it is possible to address RAM (and other devices) that the motherboard maps below 4Gb. Some recent developments allow utilize of RAM above 4 GB, but so far only for ramdrive (AOS uses PAE, OS/4 uses PSE36).

Unfortunately, newer motherboards map the bulk of RAM above 4GB and below 4GB by only 1GB or so.

[Andreas Schnellbacher]

Unfortunately, newer motherboards map the bulk of RAM above 4GB and below 4GB by only 1GB or so.

Here large parts of the RAM are below 4 GB, but Dmitry's loader recognizes just the largest contiguous block.

[Doug Clark]

Thanks guys for the response.  After reading this I started to remember this was covered in one of the WarpStock 2021 presentations  by David Azarewicz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk6iwx43lM8&list=PL4pjffCdj7wRBQfyneCN8kETgFesTSEy2&index=5

Looks like a list of compatible motherboards is more important than ever - or buying from Blond Guy and letting him do the hard work of discovering what works and what doesn't.

I have learned, the hard way, that it is worth the time and money to get hardware that is compatible, e.g. postscript printers instead of Windows printers, etc.  I believe the saying is: buy well and only cry once.

[OS4User]

Unfortunately, newer motherboards map the bulk of RAM above 4GB and below 4GB by only 1GB or so.

Here large parts of the RAM are below 4 GB, but Dmitry's loader recognizes just the largest contiguous block.

His loader recognizes all blocks of RAM - it is really pies of cake. But os2kernel has a bug and cannot work with some kind of blocks. That is why the loader reports to kernel about available memory with some correction - not all the blocks are shown.

Meanwhile os4kernel does not have that bug  -  and os4loader reports about ALL the blocks. On some system one can see that os4kernel shows more "RAM in machine" then os2kernel for this reason. (actually, difference is not very big)