ArcaOS Sluggishness

[Remy]

I can try that util Rich if you want to share it.

I sent you a PM with a link to it.

I'm zero'ing out the drive each time on my macOS machine: diskutil secureerase 0 /dev/diskx and it takes a few hours so I'm confident it's wiping the entire drive.

This sounds like a remarkably bad idea! You are wearing out your SSDs needlessly. Only the first and last 100 sectors (at most) need wiping. In any case, if you end up with a bad GPT layout (or you want to revert to MBR) there's a way to repartition it without doing a wipe. It involves making a few temporary changes to config.sys, so I'll save that until it's needed.

In the past, I used testdisk after losing a GPT disk which was altered by ArcaOS adding MBR on it during installation.
With tesdisk, I could put GPT back very quickly (may be - not tried out of windows disk and only a supposition - it could help for mbr/gpt change but other function may not be usable due jfs nor hpfs aren't told been supported)

I suggest you to use zip instead of diskcopy (I use zip now " from the root partition to save: zip -r -S -9 -y n:\drive_src.zip * (n=destination drive letter) " since arca noae support team suggested me to use zip. It could be very long but it has several  advantages. 1/ you have a backup - 2/unzip into the new partition and if needed run instalx to have it bootable

If these information could help ! 

[christech]

Ok, second SSD 128GB.. wiped it and got the same partition error. Going on vacation for a few days, will try again when I get back.

[christech]

Ok, I got Rich's program and was able to create a GPT drive, installed ArcaOS and when I rebooted to finish the installation I am stuck on the ArcaOS logo screen.

[Rich Walsh]

when I rebooted to finish the installation I am stuck on the ArcaOS logo screen.

Sad to say, that happens to me a _lot_ - as often as 1 out of 3 boots. I haven't found any fix or workaround other than the Reset button.

[Roderick Klein]

Ok, I got Rich's program and was able to create a GPT drive, installed ArcaOS and when I rebooted to finish the installation I am stuck on the ArcaOS logo screen.

Ok, I got Rich's program and was able to create a GPT drive, installed ArcaOS and when I rebooted to finish the installation I am stuck on the ArcaOS logo screen.

Interesting I have heard of more people having such an issue. The primary suspect with these random hangs is the ACPI.PSD that is running into some sort of trouble. I seen this before but I think it was tracked down what the cause was. Dutch OS/2 user Keith Merrington has such a system and have one as well. I have some questions I want you to answer:

Are you running UEFI boot on this system.  That makes debugging this hang more difficult because of some limitations.
The problem is that you can not disable the ACPI.PSD in the config.sys as ArcaOS does will not boot on the next boot.

You can try this:
https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/bootdiag/

However what is more interesting is to see if we can get a serial log of the ACPI.SD.

Question does your mainboard have a serial port ?

Doug your system has a serial port ?

If so: https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/acpi/requirements/
See the section "Collecting logs"

You need another PC with a serial port to collect the data and a terminal program.

If have more questions, let me know.

Roderick

[Pete]

Hi christech

You could try to see where the boot is failing by pressing ALT-F1 when boot starts - when you see OS/2 in the top left corner of screen.

That will bring up a "pre-boot menu" which has an option to display drivers loading. Select that then continue boot to see where boot stops - I have a hunch it may be GPT.FLT. I base that hunch on the fact that since adding an SSD on SATA1 my NVMe based system takes noticeably longer to boot and the slowdown is with loading GPT.FLT


Regards

Pete

[Doug Clark]

Roderick,

I have a serial port on the motherboard  - but I am running AOS 5.0x, i.e. MBR and legacy BIOS so I don't know if I can be any help.

[Rich Walsh]

continue boot to see where boot stops - I have a hunch it may be GPT.FLT. I base that hunch on the fact that since adding an SSD on SATA1 my NVMe based system takes noticeably longer to boot and the slowdown is with loading GPT.FLT

Nope. I've been suffering this hang for over 2 years and have never seen any indication that drivers of any sort are the cause. The kernel displays its copyright banner and then dies without anything further being displayed. If I were to make a WAG, I'd put my money on the PSD, as Roderick said.

As to GPT.FLT, the noticable slow down from adding a SATA drive (I see it too) just demonstrates NVME's superior responsiveness. That driver has to do a remarkable amount of work to get its MBR emulation set up, and dealing with a drive whose throughput is at best 25% that of NVME takes its toll on startup time. On my system, I don't consider the additional 3 seconds required to be much of an issue.

[Pete]

Hi Rich

The GPT.FLT "slowdown" doubles boot time here from around 15 secs to just over 30 secs - very noticeable when you have got used to the 15 sec boot.

You, and Roderick, are very probably right to suspect the ACPI.PSD - but it does not hurt to check where boot stops just in case it is a different problem.


Regards

Pete

[christech]

Well just for the shiggles I wiped the hard drive again and just did MBR instead of GPT. Created the EFI partition and another partition for ArcaOS. Everything worked. Booted up with no issues. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Rich Walsh]

The GPT.FLT "slowdown" doubles boot time here from around 15 secs to just over 30 secs - very noticeable when you have got used to the 15 sec boot.

That seems border-line pathological. I disabled my AHCI driver so only the NVME drive would be visible. GPT.FLT took less than a second to complete its work. I reenabled AHCI so my Western Digital 500gb SSD was visible and GPT now took 7 seconds. Could that drive be configured in BIOS as "legacy" rather than AHCI? If not, then its performance certainly seems ..umm.. sub-optimal. If you don't use the drive when running OS/2, you may want to workaround this by telling AHCI to ignore that adapter (you'll still need AHCI if you have a DVD drive).

[Rich Walsh]

Well just for the shiggles I wiped the hard drive again and just did MBR instead of GPT. Created the EFI partition and another partition for ArcaOS. Everything worked. Booted up with no issues. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

MBR is a viable option if you plan to use the machine solely for OS/2. If you plan to install other OSes, it's a luser:

* Linux may install with some coaxing but Win certainly won't

* your SSD/NVME will run slightly slower and wear out somewhat faster because MBR partitions aren't MB-aligned the way GPT partitions are

* using MBR effectively disables the firmware boot manager on the machines I've tested. Rather than booting the first entry on the its boot-order list, it will *always* load BOOTX64.EFI. That's how some users were able to switch to reFind simply by replacing BOOTX64: they're using an MBR disk - on a GPT disk the machine would likely still load LAUNCHER.EFI per the boot-order list.

[christech]

I've got another SSD I will try GPT partitioning with. It's just weird that I can create a GPT partitions with other OS's just fine - ArcaOS is very picky when it comes to storage from my experiences. I did a BIOS wipe of the SSD and other OS's were able to detect the drive, allow me to create a GPT partition and install the OS. With ArcaOS I had to have it partitioned and formatted before the installer would even recognize it.

[Rich Walsh]

I can create a GPT partitions with other OS's just fine - ArcaOS is very picky when it comes to storage from my experiences. I did a BIOS wipe of the SSD and other OS's were able to detect the drive, allow me to create a GPT partition and install the OS. With ArcaOS I had to have it partitioned and formatted before the installer would even recognize it.

The OS/2 AHCI and NVME drivers hide disks they don't recognize to prevent OS/2 LVM from destroying exotic disk formats (e.g. LUKS). You can override this behavior by adding "/!U" to the BASEDEV=OS2AHCI.ADD line in 'config.sys'. For BASEDEV=NVME.ADD, add "/U" (yes, it's the opposite of AHCI). For more details (on an installed system) look in \SYS\DOCS\AHCI and \SYS\DOCS\NVME.

Another pitfall: once a disk has been layed-out using GPT, you can't repartition it unless you disable GPT.FLT in 'config.sys'. If the util I sent you can't partition your new disk, use another OS but don't create any partitions for OS/2. Use MiniLVM to do that so they are designated as "OS/2 Type 1" partitions. (MiniLVM knows how to create Linux and Win partitions, but gparted and Disk Manager don't know how to create OS/2 partitions.)

[christech]

Thanks Rich. I appreciate all of the information.