ArcaOS 5.1 - First Impressions

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Roberto!!!

Happy New Year to you sir...let's see what's going on here:

.. checking things I found this in :

C:\MPTN\ETC\acpid.cfg

Alright...so one thing to start off with: consider turning ON the LOGs, in the same acpid.cfg file, at the very top you have the following section:

Code: [Select]

;############## General Deamon Settings ##################################
[ACPID]
; LogFile: Where to write the log file, full path, default=No log file
LogFile = G:\tmp\log\acpidaemon.log

; AcpiLog: Where to write the acpica$ log file, full path, default=don't create
AcpiLog = G:\tmp\log\AcpiCA.log

; ConfigCheckInterval: Delay in seconds between checking for config file changes, default=10
;ConfigCheckInterval = 10
...

The values above reflect my system config, so adjust accordingly. Point being, the acpidaemon.log & acpiCA.log files will have a LOT of useful info to look at.

Now let's look at the control values you were using:

...and changing only these two values changed everything completely.
; IdleCount: Number of CheckIntervals needed to determine system idle, default=5
IdleCount = 0.3125

; CheckInterval: Delay time between checking cpu load and temperature (seconds), default=1
CheckInterval = 1.3125

OK, so what exactly do these two settings do?

The ACPI daemon uses the CheckInterval as the frequency (in seconds) of checking the CPU Load & Temperature, further on, it uses the IdleCount value as the number of times the CPU Load & Temperature will be checked to determine if the system is experiencing a no-load situation, namely it appears to be in IDLE state.

From the ACPI perspective that would indicate that the CPU status can now be adjusted (and most likely set as INACTIVE) in order to lower the power consumption, which for battery operated machines is what matters!

The 'Power Manager Settings' section of the ACPI documentation (INF) file does a nice job of explaining this in pretty good details. The key take away here is that the recommendation is NOT to use CPU THROTTLING (which can be set in the [PreferredMode] section, if you have a specific reason to try a particular value).

OK, so this is all theory...how about Real-World???

Well, in my case the machine being a 24x7 box that's using a steady power supply I simply shut OFF the PowerMan function entirely because I found the control logic to be unsuitable for my purposes: CPU cores would constantly go off-line (to avoid power usage) and the time it took for them to spool back up (when the usage demanded it) took too long (regardless of how aggressive of the settings combination I would use).

So the advice I would give you is as follows: FOR TESTING PURPOSES ONLY, disable PowerMan, reboot and see what's going on.

To disable PowerMan you make the following adjustment:

Code: [Select]

;############## Power Manager Settings ###################################
[PowerMan]

; Enable: 1=enabled, 0=disabled, default=1
Enable = 0

Notice how I set 'Enable = 0', which disables it.

Test it out, if this addresses your issue and your BIOS does not report crazy CPU Temps, than you always have to option to simply NOT use PowerMan.

[Martin Iturbide]

Hello Roberto

From what I have seen, some computers work better with hyperthreading ON, and others work better OFF. For me that is a myth.

On my case, on the Thinkpad T14s 1st Gen, when I got "hyperthreading ON", I started to get boot freezes with ArcaOS 5.1. Once I disabled it, I was able to get ArcaOS working. Do you see any difference when you turn it off? do you want to try for a few days and see if there is any difference?

Regards

You got the freezes during startup or when ArcaOS was loaded and you loaded a program ?

Roderick

Hello Roderick

In my case, when I got the T14s, ArcaOS 5.1 USB flash will not boot. I got into the BIOS and disabled "Secure Boot". Now the ArcaOS USB booted but it will freeze on during boot, so I did the second recommendation, to "Disable Hyperthreading" and I was able to install ArcaOS 5.1.

Now, because of this chat, I made a quick test, I enabled Hyper-threading now that ArcaOS is installed and it booted. But it is too early yet for me to say if that is stable or not. I will report back if I get any problem.

Regards

Hello, by turning on Hyper-Threading on my T14s (1st gen) I had experienced with ArcaOS 5.1 (UEFI).
1) I see 8 processors now the CPU meter widget.
2) Sudden computer/desktop freeze, mouse keep working, clock stops and no Ctrl+Alt+Del works.  I can not tell exactly when it happens, sometimes is like 4 minutes before reboot and sometime 10 minutes. I had three freeze for what I had used the T14s today. Usually when I run Firefox for a while.
3) Sometimes boot fails and freezes on the ArcaOS 5.1 logo.

In my case I prefer to turn off Hyper-Threading for the moment.

Regards

[Roderick Klein]

Hello Roberto

From what I have seen, some computers work better with hyperthreading ON, and others work better OFF. For me that is a myth.

On my case, on the Thinkpad T14s 1st Gen, when I got "hyperthreading ON", I started to get boot freezes with ArcaOS 5.1. Once I disabled it, I was able to get ArcaOS working. Do you see any difference when you turn it off? do you want to try for a few days and see if there is any difference?

Regards

You got the freezes during startup or when ArcaOS was loaded and you loaded a program ?

Roderick

Hello Roderick

In my case, when I got the T14s, ArcaOS 5.1 USB flash will not boot. I got into the BIOS and disabled "Secure Boot". Now the ArcaOS USB booted but it will freeze on during boot, so I did the second recommendation, to "Disable Hyperthreading" and I was able to install ArcaOS 5.1.

Now, because of this chat, I made a quick test, I enabled Hyper-threading now that ArcaOS is installed and it booted. But it is too early yet for me to say if that is stable or not. I will report back if I get any problem.

Regards

Hello, by turning on Hyper-Threading on my T14s (1st gen) I had experienced with ArcaOS 5.1 (UEFI).
1) I see 8 processors now the CPU meter widget.
2) Sudden computer/desktop freeze, mouse keep working, clock stops and no Ctrl+Alt+Del works.  I can not tell exactly when it happens, sometimes is like 4 minutes before reboot and sometime 10 minutes. I had three freeze for what I had used the T14s today. Usually when I run Firefox for a while.
3) Sometimes boot fails and freezes on the ArcaOS 5.1 logo.

In my case I prefer to turn off Hyper-Threading for the moment.

Regards

While you can experiment  with hyper-threading. Just understand that the base code of OS/2 is simply not designed to run of CPU's that has hyperthreading swithed on.
Other people can correct me if I explain this wrong. But also compilers or at least the code has be written to get a performance gain from hyperthreading.
You see when you get 8 CPU's Robert you only get to extend 4 half complete CPU's cores. 
Its possible even that OS/2 can even run SLOWER with hyperthreadubg switched on. Read this wikipedia article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading

Put simple enabling hyper-threading does not add 4 full CPU cores. So a high number of cores is not better with hyper threading from a performance viewpoint.
Hence the recommendation to simply turn hyper threading off where possible. Apart from the possible performance hit, it can also add stability issue's on OS/2 and ArcaOS.

Roderick

[Pete]

Hi All

I have yet to discover how to turn off Hyper Threading with my MSI B450PRO mainboard / AMD Ryzen5 cpu - 6 cores but 12 "processors" reported by system POST.

Possibly I need to run Windows, install some AMD cpu control software...

Anyway, since installing 5.1.0 a few months back (early September) the only system freezes I get are when using Dooble (QT5) and that, from what I can gather in other discussions about Dooble, is likely caused by the qt code - and Dooble behaves exactly the same on an AMD FX4300 based system which most definitely does not have hyper threading.


My conclusion: AMD and Intel Hyper Threading seem to differ slightly and it could be worth trying Hyper Threading on AMD cpu based systems.


Regards

Pete

[Martin Iturbide]

Hi Pete

Anyway, since installing 5.1.0 a few months back (early September) the only system freezes I get are when using Dooble (QT5) and that, from what I can gather in other discussions about Dooble, is likely caused by the qt code - and Dooble behaves exactly the same on an AMD FX4300 based system which most definitely does not have hyper threading.

By any chance is Firefox working fine? or does it also produce a freeze ?

Regards

[Pete]

Hi Martin

Seamonkey works fine, no system freezes so I would expect Firefox to also work without system freezes.


Regards

Pete

[Joop]

Totally frozen, Dutch will be available with version 5.2, but they didn't mentioned which sub version. So I don't know if the hardware will last that long, I'm afraid that this is  some kind of "goodbye". I have to wait at least for another year if not more. Also no translation requests received, so its firmly on the back-burner. Occasionally I startup the  OS/2 machine and I did find out that I lost already some skills. I'm typing this from a Raspberry Pi 400, with OS/2 its complicated to get online. So, a lot of promises, with version 5.0 its promised, but no delivery. Not good. I'm not sure if I'm willing to translate with this knowledge.

[Lars]

Hi All

I have yet to discover how to turn off Hyper Threading with my MSI B450PRO mainboard / AMD Ryzen5 cpu - 6 cores but 12 "processors" reported by system POST.

Possibly I need to run Windows, install some AMD cpu control software...

Anyway, since installing 5.1.0 a few months back (early September) the only system freezes I get are when using Dooble (QT5) and that, from what I can gather in other discussions about Dooble, is likely caused by the qt code - and Dooble behaves exactly the same on an AMD FX4300 based system which most definitely does not have hyper threading.


My conclusion: AMD and Intel Hyper Threading seem to differ slightly and it could be worth trying Hyper Threading on AMD cpu based systems.


Regards

Pete

On AMD, you turn off "Hyperthreading" ( or the equivalent thereof) by selecting "only one core per package". At least that's how it shows up on my old Bulldozer based system.

[Doug Clark]

I believe Hyperthreading is an Intel only feature - meaning it only appears on Intel CPUs.  If I understand it correctly Hyperthreading was/is a technology by Intel to provide some of the benefit of multiple cores without actually having all of the hardware of the multiple cores. To quote from wikipedia "Hyper-threading works by duplicating certain sections of the processor—those that store the architectural state—but not duplicating the main execution resources"

Since it is specific to some Intel CPUs you won't find a setting in the BIOS for AMD processors to turn it on or off.

I have heard for years, as Roderick says, that hyperthreading does not work well with OS/2 and should be turned off.  However, I have had some systems with an Intel Northbridge CPUs that supported hyperthreading and my systems appeared to run fine with Hyperthreading turned on. (I didn't know at the time it was supposed to be turned off.)  But I never did a comparison with hyperthreading turned on with it turned off, so I can't say whether it was faster or slower with Hyperthreading turned on.  And - after reading this thread - I just checked and realized that Hyperthreading is turned on on my Thinkpad T530i and has been ever since I purchased it.  Oops.  And I installed AOS 5.1 on that thinkpad, apparently, with Hyperthreading turned on.

Whether Hyperthreading speeds things up or not:  when AOS came out with mulitple processor support for SNAP I turned on the multiple processor support for my AMD 4350 CPU based system (which does not have Hyperthreading) and the Workplace Shell appeared to slow down in certain situations - even while applications like FireFox sped up.  Perhaps it was my imagination.  Or perhaps some software/applications work faster in a multiple processor environment and some do not.

[Pete]

Hi Doug

Been hunting around and found that AMD doesn't have HyperThreading (HT), AMD's tech is called Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT).

SMT seems to do the same job as HT ...

Seems to work fine with ArcaOS here so will continue using it  :-)


Regards

Pete

[Dave Yeo]

Seems Ryzen's do do hyperthreading much like Intel. Here's a good overview, need to make the browser big to read with FF/SM as they don't handle the cookie notification, <url>https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74152562/what-is-the-difference-between-hyperthreading-and-multithreading-does-amd-zen-u</url> and more info on Ryzen's version, <url>https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/microarchitectures/zen#Simultaneous_MultiThreading_.28SMT.29</url>

Seems that the scheduler needs to be aware of hyperthreading to really take advantage of it, ours is pure SMP, with the S standing for symmetrical, all cores being equal.
Why it is unstable on OS/2, I'm not sure. It should be slower on a busy system, think of 2 threads running at close to a 100% and the scheduler puts both threads on one hyperthreaded core so 2 busy threads sharing one execution unit while 3 others are idle. On a lightly loaded system or with only one busy thread, things should be fine, though even then as Martin  found, it is not always the case, even with something like Firefox that mostly runs on one thread. Timing issues?
ACPI does support a CPU mask so Pete should be to only enable the real cores. Trick is figuring out how they're laid out. With luck every 2nd core being turned off would disable it.
Personally, I think 4 cores is generally enough on OS/2 and more cores being busy is likely to have memory problems. I see it with building where make allows multiple jobs, 3 almost always works, 4 usually but sometimes run out of memory errors or system lockups.
Everyone's usage patterns are different, so your mileage will vary and most programs seem to basically run on one thread, perhaps with other threads doing light duty.

[Olafur Gunnlaugsson]

I believe Hyperthreading is an Intel only feature - meaning it only appears on Intel CPUs.  If I understand it correctly Hyperthreading was/is a technology by Intel to provide some of the benefit of multiple cores without actually having all of the hardware of the multiple cores.

It is not an Intel only feature, it appeared originally on minicomputers specialised in database jobs and on some workstation/server chips, a number of the later SPARC chips have hyperthreading. The original idea is literally to speed up database jobs by having a parallel hardware threads packing inherently inefficient relational database code into something more efficiently executed on a normal CPU core, this gave you a 7 to 20% speedups in specialised tasks for for a 3% to 8% increase in transistor count. Intel originally introduced Hyperthreading on Xeons as an answer to Sun SPARC's with hyperthreading close to 20 years ago.

Even though current versions of HT are a bit more generic than the original designs they still have the same flaw, the code is packed out of order, and there is a slight unpredictable (fuzzy) delay in reordering it, not an issue in most cases, but for hard real time work such as some drivers and audio applications that get their timing reference from the soundcard rather than the CPU, this leads to hiccups. As an example on Windows, most professional audio programs that require a single timing reference (not all do) simply turn off HT via ACPI while they are running, turning it back on again when they exit.

SPARC server chips were not doing any hard real time work so this was never really an issue with them, however it became an issue as soon as Xeons came out since they were being used for real time audio and video work. I still turn HT off on my Intel machines regardless of OS due to past experiences with driver and app issues, and even on Windows I have never really found an application that takes advantage of HT to such a degree to make me consider turning it on again, but your milage may vary.

[Rich Walsh]

Totally frozen, Dutch will be available with version 5.2, but they didn't mentioned which sub version. So I don't know if the hardware will last that long, I'm afraid that this is  some kind of "goodbye". I have to wait at least for another year if not more. Also no translation requests received, so its firmly on the back-burner.[...] So, a lot of promises, with version 5.0 its promised, but no delivery. Not good. I'm not sure if I'm willing to translate with this knowledge.

If there's anyone to blame for this situation, it's your fellow countrymen.

For years I've been looking for a Dutch translator for XWP and haven't found one. For v1.0.14, I had to crowd-source my Dutch translations from people here on os2world. Sadly, they haven't been seen here since the pandemic, so I suspect they're no longer with us. So, who's left? If I can't get someone to translate 20-30 phrases every year or two, how can you expect AN to turn out something far, far larger? It seems unrealistic.

[ivan]

Nearly 30 years ago when I was doing business in Spain I had professional translators translate all our paperwork to Spanish and considered it a cost of doing business there.  You don't charge for XWP therefore you need volunteers to do the translation - Arca, on the other hand, is a business that sells a product world wide and therefore should consider translations as a cost of selling world wide.

Sorry, but that is how I see it.

[Rich Walsh]

when I was doing business in Spain I had professional translators translate all our paperwork to Spanish and considered it a cost of doing business there.

And if the cost of those professional translators were a multiple of the profits you could ever hope to make in Spain, would you have done business there? If your answer is no, then you've given AN all the justification it needs to _never_ release AOS in Dutch. It just isn't economic unless the translations are done pro bono.