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WebSite Information => Article Discussions => Topic started by: Martin Iturbide on March 12, 2019, 06:39:58 pm

Title: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Martin Iturbide on March 12, 2019, 06:39:58 pm
About: [Arca Noae] Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware (https://www.os2world.com/past-news/79-general/22455-arca-noae-arca-noae-progress-report-arcaos-on-uefi-only-hardware.html)

Hi

Very good news. It is great to see finally (referring to the old Mensys/XEU days) some progress for the present of the platform. Even that UEFI support is still on very early stage, it is good to see that something has started, I'm looking forward to test that on the future.

I'm on the "Arca Noae Test" mailing list and even that I don't contribute as much as I would like to, I really see that things are moving to release Arca Noae 5.0.4 and the progress for the localization releases for ArcaOS 5.1. There is a lot of details on each update and a lot of movement there.

As you can see, today I'm very optimistic about the platform. Remember that ArcaOS 5.0.0 was released on May 15, 2017, and it had eclipsed any eComStation functionality in only one year. I really hope that after the ArcaOS 5.1 launch with local languages support, Arca Noae can focus more on the present of the platform (drivers, drivers, drivers) and also start thinking on the long term future (component replacement, API improvement, WPS improvements, growing the user base and more bold things).

Regards
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: ivan on March 12, 2019, 07:56:24 pm
I agree Martin, it is good to see some improvements but I do wish they would do something about the USB3.0 and 3.1 problem.  It is becoming harder to find PCIe based USB2 add in cards that don't use a xHCI based chip working in USB2 mode.  It makes it extremely difficult to use Ryzen based motherboards (no usb keyboards, mouse, trackball etc.).
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Dennis Smith on March 12, 2019, 08:37:47 pm
This is a big feat considering most of the source code is either lost by IBM or somewhere in Russia.  It must have taken a lot of reverse engineering of low level code to make it happen.
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Andreas Schnellbacher on March 12, 2019, 08:58:28 pm
It is great to see finally (referring to the old Mensys/XEU days) some progress for the present of the platform.
The next feature regarding the survival of OS/2 will probably be a driver for USB 3.

Remember that ArcaOS 5.0.0 was released on May 15, 2017, and it had eclipsed any eComStation functionality in only one year.
BTW: That's not entirely true. ArcaOS bases on all the development that was made prior for eCS 2.2 beta 2 and thereafter (by almost the same people, now within a new environment). There were several years we saw eCS dying before the release of ArcaOS 5.0.0.
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Martin Iturbide on March 12, 2019, 11:27:35 pm
Hi

I'm not sure if I can talk about what is going on inside the AN test mailing list in detail, I don't want to get kicked out. I just can say that I remain optimist about USB 3 also.

Regards
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on March 27, 2019, 01:27:20 am
I second Martin's comments and concur that it is exciting to see the level of concerted effort to keep things not just alive, but improving on our platform.

At the same time I do not want to overlook the contributions that have been made over the years by other projects & contributors, without them I am not sure that AN could have ever been "born".

Keeping my fingers crossed, and contributing here and there with some testing, feedback and monetary contributions. I do genuinely wish there was an easier way for inviduals like myself to contribute more meaningfully though.
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Doug Bissett on March 27, 2019, 07:09:06 am
I am confident that USB 3 will appear, (to quote Lewis) "soonish". ("Soonish" being a technical term for "someday"  ;D)

The biggest problem is that the guy who is doing it, also has a dozen (perhaps more) other "important" projects under development, and they still haven't found a way to work 24 hours a day, while remaining productive (or even sane) over the long term.

It is coming, but it all takes time to get it right.
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Lars on March 27, 2019, 09:03:43 am
The nail in the coffin for OS/2 will neither be UEFI nor USB 3.
It will be the lack of an internet browser.
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Roderick Klein on March 27, 2019, 12:15:05 pm
The nail in the coffin for OS/2 will neither be UEFI nor USB 3.
It will be the lack of an internet browser.

That is what the OS/2 community is trying to resolve by porting the latest QT to OS/2. That way we can port Chromium to OS/2. The fact the QT port is done for 70% brings that within a realistic reach!

Roderick
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Sigurd Fastenrath on March 27, 2019, 01:01:21 pm
The reason why I almost left the plattform behind me in personal is that I realize during the last months this:

There are three parties left:

1.) ArcaNoae: making the OS and drivers, pushing things forward, has to make/earn money. Delivering excellent software. On the other hand (as a result of "the money"): focussed on industrial clients and their needs. Keeping things "closed". Lower priority for software vendors, lowest priority is the community. Taking not part in Forums where the community is (for various reasons, but I never understood the "No Time" Reason, as it may take only a few minutes a day or even once a week to monitor what is happening there).

2.) Bitwise Works, other free developers: trying to keep the software alive (internet browser, office, ...), user oriented, benefits to both, Arca Noae and the community

3.) The community, or what is left of it. Has lowest priority for ArcaNoae as the money is to be earned in the industrial sector.

That is just my personal statement and point of view. And it is not complaining, even if it might sound like this. Sometimes I wish I could express myself here in my mothertongue, Deutsch, but for obvious reasons that would make not much sense, even though I could "besser schreiben und ausdrücken, was ich wirklich meine" and therefore avoid misunderstanding.

Yes, I know, that is nothing new for the almost all of you, and it does not matter at all. Even if there will be UEFI, NVMe support, this all will benefit industrial clients and the community users or privat users as well, but everything else wich would benefit the privat users more than industrial clients is not in sight. WLAN i.e. Better Sound.

So ArcaNoae will for sure move on, and will bring fantastic new functions to OS/2, but it will stay focused on industrial clients, and those usually do not need WLAN or Sound or...

So, there is no reason for me other than monitoring the development. Expecting this or that feature or driver in the near future is just - dreaming. And I invested already to much money in that dreaming. It was time to wake up.

I made excellent expierences with OS/2 (from Warp 3 on) inside VMWARE PRO, only the missing - or better not working - sound support is a showstopper right now. But I may get a solution for this.

I am looking forward to the OS/2 User meeting in Cologne in November together with Thomas Müller. Would be nice to see a German Version of ArcaNoae 5.1 then though. All the best.


Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: David Graser on March 27, 2019, 03:52:38 pm
I remember seeing this years ago.  This was the wish list back in 2004. It is interesting to see what was desired back then.

http://os2news.warpstock.org/OS2Wishlist.html

Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Doug Bissett on March 27, 2019, 08:20:42 pm
Quote
I never understood the "No Time" Reason, as it may take only a few minutes a day or even once a week to monitor what is happening there).

No, it takes much more time than that. It also takes a LOT of time to try to explain to those who don't want to know, why it all takes so long, and fend off the swords (not to mention debunk the FUD, which helps nobody). They just don't need the hassles, and they can spend their time in more productive ways (including sleeping). Those of us who are on the test team do keep them informed, when there is something worth passing on. In fact, they seem to be ahead of most of the discussion here. That is one of the reasons why they do brief news reports.

Quote
Has lowest priority for ArcaNoae as the money is to be earned in the industrial sector.

Not entirely true, but the sales contract does demand that they support the contract terms. We all need whatever the industrial sector needs, so there is a lot of overlap. They pay for the service, so they expect to get the service. Any user can buy the "full service" version of ArcaOS, but everybody seems to want it all for free. It ain't going to happen (IBM still wants their pound of flesh, and somebody needs to support those who are doing the work). Personally, I think that Arca Noae has struck a pretty good balance, and they are managing the whole project very well. Certainly it could be better, but it could also be a whole lot worse.
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: ivan on March 27, 2019, 09:06:54 pm
No matter what anyone says, the use of OS/2/ArcaOS is going to end-up on the ability to actually install it on modern hardware and that includes AMD processors because of the people in industry having been bitten by the Intel meltdown and spectre CPU bugs.
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Martin Iturbide on March 27, 2019, 11:16:37 pm
Ohh, the eternal discussion... Enterprise or End Consumer.  The trick here is how do you keep the balls on the air to support both and trying to align the outcome, so when you do something for one, it will also benefit the other.

Sadly OS/2 is not free (as in beer and as in freedom). Money, enterprise agreements, IBM tax, customer and paid employee are required on this case. I don't think that Arca Noae is not hearing the community and only focusing on the industrial customers. I think that they have a lot of work to produce ArcaOS 5.1 and the local translations, compared to the money flow they may be getting. I don't think that Arca Noae's stockholders are getting rich with this business, like some communist may think.

Quote
Personally, I think that Arca Noae has struck a pretty good balance, and they are managing the whole project very well. Certainly it could be better, but it could also be a whole lot worse.

I agree with Doug's statement and I also have some criticism for Arca Noae and the platform, but if I look back in time and remember that ArcaOS 5.0.0 was just released on May 15, 2017, I noticed that it is not "a lot" of time to consolidate completely an operating system (or even a Linux distro). I'm holding my criticism until May 15, 2019  ;D ;D

Regards
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on March 28, 2019, 03:53:27 am
I think Doug made a couple of excellent points. True, this forum does not get regular updates from the AN folks...however, the information does trickle in through those who participate in the testing activities.

Regarding the commercial over personal use focus by AN team...hmm, I am actually of quite the opposite opinion. To be very frank, it has been nothing but impressive to have multiple reported issues acknowledged and worked on, with resolutions being provided to nearly all of them...and yet here i am, a lowly "individual" right?

Thw weakness I see today is the seemingly very steep hill one needs to climb in order to join the development efforts. I know this may seem a bit like beating a dead horse, but I have tried this on my own and while many folks have pointed me "here and there", the fact remains that nowhere is there a single and CURRENT solution (a full build environment) available that we can pick up, set up, start producing things and stay in-sync with the toolsets and libraries the main parties (BWW and AN) are using.

If that is too hard to overcome we could always focus on converting whatever software is currently out there into RPM packages. This might go a long way towards standardizing the distribution stream and possibly might allow us to avoid some of the "it works here but fails there" type of situations. Standardization in this way would bring consistency.
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Jan-Erik Lärka on March 28, 2019, 05:42:18 am
It was Arca Noae that started the development of Arca Noae Package Manager (ANPM) and they offer it free of charge. It's a product that we may take for granted or wish has more features built in, but it provides you and me as end users (and devlopers) with a point and click application to install and update software components and libraries. Some of you have started to explore how to create packages for it,something that is great, wow. OS2World or Voice shuld host a repository of those packages to select from.

Lewis himself is involved in the community and work as treasurer of the Warpstock board:
http://www.warpstock.org/staticpages/index.php?page=directors
sometimes just passive reader while at other times take part in discussions.

We've always had to choose the hardware with care and Audio and WiFi is no different. This cheap laptop I write this on, came with an Atheros WiFi chip that I wish there where a driver for.
Arca Noae am aware of my need for a driver for this specific chip, just as with each of you and at the same time look at the bigger picture to see that they need to continue to resolve more things, but in another order that I can see or would choose from my perspective. The development resources are limited but they have a plan that they re(de)fine as time progress.

Am quite fund of the idea to develop new unified (qt-)libraries and routines to port drivers and software as it should allow us to get modern, stable and tested drivers and software that we otherwise never can expect. It may take some more time to get there, but we've seen many useful solutions that share common parts on OS/2.

More details:

The Linux way to develop, alter a lot of the core with each update, instead of keeping a stable mature core/interface. It affect projects like UniAud and Multimac etc.

* It seem as if they've modified so much in the kernel sources now that it's no longer possible to recompile the Linux ALSA code on OS/2. They have therefore started to work on a new Audio driver.
( Listen to the video URL below )

* WiFi has been delayed as the Linux kernel sources, that is the base for the Multimac library, change so much with each update.
( Listen to the video URL below )

Information has been obtained from this video url below and other Warpstock presentations made by David Azarewicz:
https://youtu.be/yr0dKX3YMdU?list=PL4pjffCdj7wQ1sMlO0j-gbGSUEnibfxwc
From about 30:00 you will hear David say it himself: He has spent time fixing boot issues on new hardware and resources are limited.

While I want WiFi and Audio drivers as well I think it's a bit to far to say that Arca Noae has the community set to the lowest priority.
It's just that they are very busy and working very hard. One adjustment to the video driver Panorama improved the performance for most systems but caused some (like mine) to not boot to desktop. Arca Noae resolved that issue very professionally and Panorama now handle many more (some even obscure) systems after that.

Regards,
//Jan-Erik
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Doug Bissett on March 28, 2019, 06:00:06 am
No matter what anyone says, the use of OS/2/ArcaOS is going to end-up on the ability to actually install it on modern hardware and that includes AMD processors because of the people in industry having been bitten by the Intel meltdown and spectre CPU bugs.

FWIW, I have been using AMD processors for a number of years, with no problems. The Intel problems are irrelevant, since there doesn't seem to be any way to deliver the payload to cause problems (that could be wrong, but I, personally, agree with that assessment)

I understand your concern about AMD Ryzen processors (which I don't have), however, from what I have heard, Arca Noae has probably got that one solved. I am not sure when it will be available. USB 3 seems to be well on the way. As announced recently, they are making progress with UEFI machines, that do not have the CSS module. Language support is getting closer. Other things are in the works. The bottom line is, that Arca Noae is working, very hard, on the problems. If you insist that they should waste time in these forums, rather than work on the problems, it will take longer.
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Lars on March 28, 2019, 08:10:03 am
Will "UEFI only" systems be the end of Panorama ?
Panorama uses VESA BIOS services. I wonder in how far that will work if you have no conventional BIOS any more.
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: David Graser on March 28, 2019, 04:16:28 pm

Arca Noae am aware of my need for a driver for this specific chip, just as with each of you and at the same time look at the bigger picture to see that they need to continue to resolve more things, but in another order that I can see or would choose from my perspective. The development resources are limited but they have a plan that they re(de)fine as time progress.

Am quite fund of the idea to develop new unified (qt-)libraries and routines to port drivers and software as it should allow us to get modern, stable and tested drivers and software that we otherwise never can expect. It may take some more time to get there, but we've seen many useful solutions that share common parts on OS/2.

//Jan-Erik

Over 8 years ago, my wife told me to remove my computer from the bedroom.  To use it elsewhere required WIFI.  To use elsewhere required 20 feet of ethernet cable.  Then my wife complained about the cable running across the floor.

I was then reduced to using Windows for too long.  When I heard that ArcaOS was continuing development of the OS/2 platform, I was thrilled and decided to purchase knowing that WIFI drivers might be eventually coming.  I ran the cable again and listened to my wife complain about the unsightly cable.  I endured because I have always enjoyed using the OS/2 platform.  Although Windows is more stable, it tracks everything you do.  This I do not care for. 

With the OS/4 kernel, the FFSandyBridge, and the AVX libs, I now have reliable internet.  Not one trap in almost 2 weeks.

With the Tp-Link ac750 which was recommended by others on this forum, I now have WIFI for my laptop.  Yes, it is not built into the computer.  That does not matter to me.

Another contributor to this forum gave info on how to use all my USB ports, including USB3.  Turn USB3 off in the bios and all USB ports now work as USB2.  Instead of one usable USB port, I now have three.

I have had to re-educate myself on the OS/2 platform because I had forgotten so much.  The sad part is that I once could write HLP and INF files.  I forgot how and at this point have not tried to relearn.

ArcaOS is a breath of fresh air for me.  I contribute monthly to the QT project because of its importance and because with daughter married, I have some extra money.

I am pleased with what ArcaOS has accomplished so far.  An OS/2 drought has taught me patience and I excitedly wait for the new features or improvements.
Title: Re: Arca Noae progress report: ArcaOS on UEFI-only hardware
Post by: Sandra Asja Eickel on February 05, 2020, 08:35:51 pm
I know this is a really old topic, but I think it's worth refreshing with a new link to Arca Noae about exactly this theme:

https://www.arcanoae.com/what-arca-noaes-upcoming-uefi-support-means-for-arcaos/ (https://www.arcanoae.com/what-arca-noaes-upcoming-uefi-support-means-for-arcaos/)

In other threads, I've written more about this topic and USB 3 (XHCI) support.

Greetings,
Sandra-Asja