ArcaOS Sluggishness

[Roderick Klein]

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.

With ArcaOS and using GPT discs issue's should in much less cases
However there is a warning. If you switch from GPT to MBR disc for example. A GPT disc has its partition stored at the beginning and at the end of the disc! So if you wipe the first portion o the only with DFSee, you could open up pandoras box. Better use inidisk.exe to setup the disc properly.

Roderick

[Pete]

Hi Rich

Not over stressed about the boot time - just surprised.

SATA is set as AHCI in the BIOS.
Windows 11 boots in under 20 secs from this SSD so I guess GPT.FLT does not like something about the SSD.

I only had the SATA disk visible to ArcaOS while fannying around getting rEFInd working and it is now "ignored" on the config.sys line
     BASEDEV=OS2AHCI.ADD /A:0 /P:0 /I

Back to fast booting  :-)


Regards

Pete

[christech]

So it seems I had an issue with my BIOS that was preventing me from booting up after the first phase of a UEFI ArcaOS installation. The setting was "Enabling Memory Mapped IO > 4GB" that I needed to disable for my non-UEFI installation when I upgraded to 5.1 originally. On my UEFI install it would hang on the ArcaOS logo after phase 1 reboot until I re-enabled it. I am going to try that GPT partition again.

Aren't computers fun?  Any other OS that gave me this much trouble I would have just given up!

[Roderick Klein]

So it seems I had an issue with my BIOS that was preventing me from booting up after the first phase of a UEFI ArcaOS installation. The setting was "Enabling Memory Mapped IO > 4GB" that I needed to disable for my non-UEFI installation when I upgraded to 5.1 originally. On my UEFI install it would hang on the ArcaOS logo after phase 1 reboot until I re-enabled it. I am going to try that GPT partition again.

Aren't computers fun?  Any other OS that gave me this much trouble I would have just given up!

Interesting. Oke that means there is possibly a bug in the UEFI loader.
You see when you switch 4 GB ABOVE decoding is off UEFI boot should work as well.
This means all PCI devices get address ranges below the 4 GB address range.

However it should also work when enabled. As the loader has code to rempa PCI devices.
This is needed on systems where you have devices only above the 4 GB. Maybe open a bug
in the Arca Noae bugtracker https://mantis.arcanoae.com.

Roderick

[Andrew Stephenson]

Aren't computers fun?  Any other OS that gave me this much trouble I would have just given up!

Think of it as a sheepdog.  When still young, a yappy scatterbrain, racing about recklessly, getting everything wrong.  Once properly trained and disciplined, you wouldn't trade it for the world.  Arf?

[Roderick Klein]

So it seems I had an issue with my BIOS that was preventing me from booting up after the first phase of a UEFI ArcaOS installation. The setting was "Enabling Memory Mapped IO > 4GB" that I needed to disable for my non-UEFI installation when I upgraded to 5.1 originally. On my UEFI install it would hang on the ArcaOS logo after phase 1 reboot until I re-enabled it. I am going to try that GPT partition again.

Aren't computers fun?  Any other OS that gave me this much trouble I would have just given up!

As long time OS/2 user I hope your experience with OS/2 would have been better. I do however hope you understand Arca Noae does not have access to all equipment. in the world.
The code that inside the UEFI loader is brand new. This is the first  OS/2 version ever with UEFI support. Not all bugs can be captured by Arca Noae.
If you want to help open a bug report.  Maybe the issue can be resolved and your findings can help to prevent this on possibly other systems.

Roderick Klein

[Martin Iturbide]

Hi

So it seems I had an issue with my BIOS that was preventing me from booting up after the first phase of a UEFI ArcaOS installation. The setting was "Enabling Memory Mapped IO > 4GB" that I needed to disable for my non-UEFI installation when I upgraded to 5.1 originally. On my UEFI install it would hang on the ArcaOS logo after phase 1 reboot until I re-enabled it. I am going to try that GPT partition again.

Christech, so can you say that disabling the "Enabling Memory Mapped IO > 4GB" on the BIOS/UEFI was the solution of your install/sluggishness problems?
Is your Dell Precision T3610 now working as expected with ArcaOS 5.1 in BIOS and UEFI mode?

FYI, According to DELL's site this feature does: "Enables or disables the support for the PCIe devices that need large amounts of memory. Enable this option only for 64-bit operating systems. This option is set to Enabled by default. "

Just checking around the internet I found this issue on a different Dell model. They suggest updating the BIOS, did you check if your T3610 is using the latest BIOS just in case?

Regards

[Lars]

Why do you call this an 'issue'?
Fact is, OS/2 as a 32-bit OS can only deal with 32-bit physical addresses. What this BIOS option ensures (if disabled) is that only address ranges in the lower 4GB physical address region are assigned to any PCI card that needs a memory address range for its operation (even for those cards that themselves can deal with 64-bit physical addresses, the upper 32-bit are then assumed to be 0).
And then, OS/2 can work together with this PCI card.

[Dave Yeo]

Isn't os2ldr.x64 a 64 bit program that can sometimes reassign addresses to below the 4GB boundary, same with the frame buffer, sometimes needs to be moved to below 4GB and IIRC, some hardware doesn't allow that and can't run OS/2.

[Roderick Klein]

Isn't os2ldr.x64 a 64 bit program that can sometimes reassign addresses to below the 4GB boundary, same with the frame buffer, sometimes needs to be moved to below 4GB and IIRC, some hardware doesn't allow that and can't run OS/2.

Infact this remap code works in a lot of cases. Unless a frame buffer does not fit the 4GB memory range.

Roderick

[Roderick Klein]

Hi

So it seems I had an issue with my BIOS that was preventing me from booting up after the first phase of a UEFI ArcaOS installation. The setting was "Enabling Memory Mapped IO > 4GB" that I needed to disable for my non-UEFI installation when I upgraded to 5.1 originally. On my UEFI install it would hang on the ArcaOS logo after phase 1 reboot until I re-enabled it. I am going to try that GPT partition again.

Christech, so can you say that disabling the "Enabling Memory Mapped IO > 4GB" on the BIOS/UEFI was the solution of your install/sluggishness problems?
Is your Dell Precision T3610 now working as expected with ArcaOS 5.1 in BIOS and UEFI mode?

FYI, According to DELL's site this feature does: "Enables or disables the support for the PCIe devices that need large amounts of memory. Enable this option only for 64-bit operating systems. This option is set to Enabled by default. "

Just checking around the internet I found this issue on a different Dell model. They suggest updating the BIOS, did you check if your T3610 is using the latest BIOS just in case?

Regards

Again if under UEFI boot he needs to TURN ON (enable) the above 4 GB memory option. This is possible issue in the UEFI loader.
The UEFI loader should BTW be able to deal with both cases. Opening a bug in https://mantis.arcanoae.com would be a welcome thing.
And it mgiht get fixes.

Roderick

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Pete,

...SATA is set as AHCI in the BIOS.
Windows 11 boots in under 20 secs from this SSD so I guess GPT.FLT does not like something about the SSD.

I only had the SATA disk visible to ArcaOS while fannying around getting rEFInd working and it is now "ignored" on the config.sys line
     BASEDEV=OS2AHCI.ADD /A:0 /P:0 /I...

This may not be the situation in your case, however on my machine which also supports AHCI, anytime I try to actually enable it I do end up seeing consistent HALTs to the machine. What I mean by that is that the whole OS/2 box simply freezes, this last typically around 10 secs., following which it comes back ALIVE and all is well, until it re-occurs again.

I did a whole whack of testing to try to figure this out, nothing surfaced and since I honestly didn't see any visible performance difference with AHCI being turned ON (all the drives that are actually being accessed and used are SSD units), I simply left it OFF.

Therefore, I'm curious what happens in your system if you turn AHCI OFF and boot w/o having the IGNORE option set to ON?

[Pete]

Hi Dariusz

What I would expect to happen if AHCI support is turned off in the BIOS is that the AHCI.ADD driver will not load (no controller hardware) and my SATA DVDRW, which uses AHCI, will not work (read/write).

Here the BIOS options for SATA are
1] AHCI
2] RAID
No, no (E)IDE/PATA option.


I guess you must be accessing SSDs as EIDE(PATA) using dansi506.add?

AHCI is a little faster than EIDE(PATA) - and NVMe is faster than AHCI  :-)

I am turning off AHCI support for the SATA1 connected SSD because:
1 ]something, seems to be gpt.flt, gets a bit freaked out by that drive - Windows11 install on it - which doubles boot time
2] I have absolutely no need/want to access the Windows11 installation on that drive from ArcaOS

I have not seen any problems with AHCI myself on various systems that I have used it on, was happily using it on this system with an SSD and a "spinner" as well as a DVDRW until I purchased an NVMe drive.

Ouch! Just got prodded by wife who reminds me that a few years ago I had a system that was "misbehaving" with weird, occasional system freezes. I thought a drive was dying and enlisted the help of Jan (DFSee) to try to ascertain which of the 4 disks fitted was having a problem. After looking through the logs he advised me to check my PSU, power and data leads. Testing the PSU output revealed fluctuating voltages, opening the PSU and seeing a few "overcooked" bits explained a lot.

I think in your position I would check SATA leads, power and data, are connected properly and that the PSU is clean and outputting correct, consistent voltages etc, also worth checking system fans are clean(ish). Although if this all works fine with danis506.add there should not be a problem...

Out of interest:
 What hardware is involved? ie mainboard/chipset(s), SSDs
 What config.sys line would you be using for AHCI support


Regards

Pete