Messages

1

Programming / Re: CPUMON - source code location?

« on: December 01, 2024, 03:50:43 pm »

Paul,
Ahhh...never thought about that avenue...good stuff, sent him a msg.

Martin,
Much appreciated sir! Hopefully between my LinkedIn shout-out and your email we'll get a positive response.

Thank you gents!

2

Programming / CPUMON - source code location?

« on: December 01, 2024, 01:47:49 am »

I have Trevor Hemsley's CPUMON here and I love the overall arrangment / functionality that little util has...BUT...there are a few things I'd like to change: the graph legend as getting past the 2-4 core CPUs these days produces a bit of a mess, colour sync between the lines and CPUx on the legend, provide for a user-controllable refresh rate, etc.

Needless to say, I looked everywhere and haven't found the sources...any ideas where I might though?

Thanks!

3

Hardware / Re: Report Your Working ArcaOS-OS2 Hardware Month

« on: November 16, 2024, 05:32:30 pm »

Hi Martin!

...More reports are welcome !!
And even if you reported something before ArcaOS 5.1 (UEFI) or before the USB 3.x were released, it is a good time to check it out and let me know what to update !!
Regards

OLD hardware here (working very well with OS/2 CP2 however), so are you still looking for those as well, or focusing more on the mainstream (or at max -5 yrs. from today) timeframe?

EDIT
====
LOL - umm, re-reading the Subject of the post gives me the answer...yikes, just how did I miss that???

4

Hardware / Re: Monitor suggestions

« on: November 12, 2024, 10:11:36 pm »

Per,

What is the functionality you are specifically looking for, if any?

Here is what I mean:

1) if you want high-quality colour reproduction, you'd want something that covers a wide colour spectrum, there are specific ratings for this (CG, CIE1976 Colour Gamut, etc.), luminance or viewing angles

2) if you want a general 'home computing' display, I would suggest you look for something with a good contrast, wide viewing angle and good colour gamut

Refresh rate on the other hand, we are talking the gaming monitors type stuff is all tied to actual game FPS ratings and therefore things like response time become extremely important.

5

Hardware / Re: Observations on intel vs AMD

« on: November 09, 2024, 03:40:33 pm »

Hi Doug,

I have attached Sysbench results - it seems not much of my hardware was recognized so I edited some of the descriptions in the results.

My 2 top priorities for a machine are a big screen and a good keyboard.

For graphics I am running a Radeon X600 because SNAP supports the chipset and therefore I can run dual monitors - as shown in the attached picture desktop_2.jpg  Which gets me a big screen for a very reasonable amount of money. 27" 1920x1080 LCD monitors run about $100 each nowdays.
...
This combination has a great feel - both screen and input wise. But installing an older card like the X600, or the X850, can be a challenge on a new machine, because of hardware issues and the installer for AOS 5.1...

Excellent, thank you for sharing.

Yeah, so it would seem that my focus and priority on having not just a usable but also 'fitting' OS/2 experience matches yours pretty closely. The extensive summary & feedback you are providing here is GOLDEN!!! I appreciate the time you have put into this...

...
1) AOS 5.1 installer will not run unless the graphics card/chipset supports GOP (graphics output protocol), which apparently came along with UEFI.  The Radeon X600, and probably the X850 do not support GOP and therefor the AOS installer will not run with those cards.  I may be stating this incorrectly but that essentially is the issue.

2) I could not find a single Ryzen 5 processor (when I purchased) that had an on-board graphics processor and supported a PICe gen 4 sockets.  Apparently the chips had a limited number of gen 4 lanes and dedicated them to the on-board graphics chip.  I wanted at least one gen 4 socket so I could get a faster NVMe SSD.  I might have been able to get a Ryzen 7 that had the graphics processor and at least one gen4 NVMe socket but those generate more heat and didn't come with a cooler so you pay more intial costs and operating costs for probably not much if any performance gain.

3) I purchased a graphics card that would support GOP so the AOS installer would run, then took the card out and replaced with the Radeon X600 to get SNAP support and dual monitors. The cheapest I could  find was a Radoen HD 5450 put out by VisonTek that cost about $70.

4) This means I needed a maintenance partition on a hard drive because I would not be able to boot from the install USB stick when problems arose unless I switched video cards .
...

So this has been quite a concern of mine: how the heck to transition to the new hardware while not having to give up most of the functionality I enjoy today. Great insights right there...especially the stuff dealing with the GPU swap as I wouldn't have known about it and as best as I can tell this isn't called out anywhere else (albeit I migth have of course missed it, if it was).

My son has left me his "old" Ryzen hardware for an upgrade consideration: Asus Prime X470-PRO, AMD Ryzen7 motherboard, Ryzen7 2700X CPU, GeForce GTX 1060 GPU, 16G RAM and a Samsung 970 Pro, M.2 NVMe PCI-E 512GB drive. I keep on trying to carve out the time to take on that projects, but all too often it is just sooo much easier to plug away on the stuff that's working for me right now! lol

...BTW - I have an old Radeon X800 in the basement and might drag it out to see what it does for the graphics benchmarks.  I switched to the X600 because the X800 took up two slots, had a loud fan, and was a power piggy.  This new machine is essentially silent - I have to get my head right next the fans in the case to hear anything at all.  It is uses about 60 watts at the desktop at idle (without a screen saver) 90 watts when the screen saver kicks in.  At boot-up it hits about 120 watts briefly...

I am thinking that the X600=>X800 move will just about close out whatever gaps you may be seeing right now.

The SNAP drivers could be made a tad better by providing additional controls for the GPU, but maybe architectually this wasn't quite fully completed even when the SNAP development was ongoing. Case in point, my X850XT PE is actually the R480 chip with 540 MHz core frequency and 590 MHz memory frequency, but SNAP only runs it at 400/400:

Code: [Select]

Graphics device configuration:
  Manufacturer......... ATI
  Chipset.............. Radeon X850 Series
  Bus Type............. PCI Express
  Memory............... 24576 KB
  DAC.................. ATI Internal 24 bit DAC
  Clock................ ATI Internal Clock
  Memory Clock......... 400 MHz
  Default Memory Clock. 400 MHz
  Maximum Memory Clock. 400 MHz
  Driver Revision...... 3.2, Build 29
  Driver Build......... May  2 2017
  Certified Version.... Not Certified

So a while back I wrote a little util to manipulate those settings thinking that if the SNAP drivers are detecting these and the SDK API is described as being able to SET these...I might as well maximize my hardware!

No-go, while the util runs and no errors are returned, the SysBench results do not change.

Anyways, no biggie, especially in light of the as-is doing exactly what I need it to do so far.

6

Hardware / Re: Observations on intel vs AMD

« on: November 08, 2024, 08:01:16 pm »

Hey Doug!

...desktop Ryzen 5 5600x on MSI PROB500-VC (circa late 2020) with very fast NVMe SSD and spinning hard drive.  The Ryzen 5 5600x and MSI PROB550-VC can still be purchased new as of this writing (Nov 2024). 
...
Performance
-----------------
Graphical: I am not gaming on any machine so for me graphical performance on all three are basically the same. The machines are running both panorama (T530) and SNAP in both accelerated (Ryzen) and non-accelerated mode (EliteDesk 800), and for me there is no noticeable difference in graphical performance.  This includes text mode scrolling in editors and command line prompts, as well as graphical performance in VLC while playing movies...

I am very interested in the AMD Ryzen stuff, especially in light of this being a configuration that allows you to run SNAP.

I have an old ATI X850XT PE video card here that, until I decide to buy one of these curved high-resolution displays, will continue to serve me in a dual-head configuration.

OK, so what GPU are you running? ...as this would certain appear to be a viable approach.

Further on, can you post the matching SysBench results for your combo? (I've attached mine)

I recently upgraded (yes, LOL, I am dealing with some rather ancient hardware here by today's standards, but alas, where is the fun in all this otherwise?) from a AMD Phenom II X6 110T (6-core) to AMD FX-8370 Piledriver (8-core) CPU configuration.

Without getting into the nitty gritty CPU architecture details, I have been somewhat dissapointed with the outcome...but hey, only $50 later it can hardly be thought off as 'wasted spend'!

So bottom line here being: performance benchmarks aside, it is the whole feel of the machine that needs to be right, and before one spends the $$$ to go there I would ideally love to be able to do some kind of an assessment as to what the outcomes may be.

7

Applications / Re: XWP 1.0.17: any availability date ?

« on: November 08, 2024, 07:30:54 pm »

Hello Martin,

...I'm lost on the "RMB 'Copy/Paste/Cut' (Dariusz)", can someone explain it to me?
Is it something that with the "right mouse click" shows a menu with  'Copy/Paste/Cut' ? Was it available and it is not available anymore? or was some special software?...

So if I recall correctly it was either Xit or NPS that enabled the additional pop-up options that deal with the Copy/Paste/Cut etc. operations. This was applicable to the TEXT content, with the benefit of it being active ANYWHERE that TEXT content was available: so editors, as well as text fields, etc...thus making it very useful when you are trying to avoid re-typing stuff.

I ended up disabling Xit for precisely the reasons Rich mentioned: there were just too many exceptions I was running into where Xit would mess with the application itself. Heck, Lucide is a perfect example, attempting to search for some string would oftentimes cause it to freeze WPS. I had similar issues with PMMail where upon startup WPS would freeze. Hard to explain why, but removing Xit cured it.

So anyways, until Dave mentioned it here in his response I was completely unware of the functionality that operation he suggested brings:

1) highlight the text you want and while still LMB pressing down click on the RMB => tada...the text is copied

Now to PASTE this, you simply:

1) push down on the RMB, and click on the LMB

easy!!!

8

Applications / Re: XWP 1.0.17: any availability date ?

« on: November 06, 2024, 02:30:27 am »

Rich,

I badly miss the easy RMB 'Copy/Paste/Cut' option...could we get that implemented???

Soooo handy all over the place...tired of always going up to the Menu bar and selecting from there.

Thanks,
-Dariusz

9

Programming / Re: DosSetThreadAffinity - process or thread only?

« on: October 19, 2024, 04:35:38 pm »

Hi Andi,

...OS/2 runs threads on different cores. Not only whole processes like some other OSes do (did). If you monitor your widget you also may see that OS/2 seem to switch threads from core to core regularly...

Yes, agreed, this I completely understand.

Further on, could I develop a system driver which would enforce the execution of specific programs (i.e. processes) on a specific CPU/core of a SMP system?

Again, not processes but threads run on different cores. Why do you want to force to OS to run one thread on a specific core? Do you wanna overheat a single core?...

So for me this is a combination of two things:

1) OS/2
- I have a persistent problem with a few specific applications where starting them will freeze my machine, however if I shut down all but a single core the app starts up just fine, re-enabling all other cores following this will allow the OS/2 scheduler to dispatch the threads across all other cores, exactly as you highlighted above

- I have been told that this may be a SNAP driver bug, perhaps, I simply do not know, but I am trying to understand why this is taking place and why marking the EXE as MPUNSAFE doesn't seem to address the issue

- subsequently if I were to build a wrapper that attaches it's main thread to a specific core I am curious if starting another process by that thread would therefore apply and force the 'offending' app to retain that core affinity setting? If this were proven out, I could have a driver (as per my original thread) that would cause such specific apps to be bound to a single core during startup, thus perhaps addressing the issue I'm seeing

2) ACADEMIC
- way back in '94-'95 I did my undergrad thesis on the topic of backprop neural networks, training anything with a most primitive net architecture took a VEEERRYYYYY long time (LOL)

- ever since the SMP realm became reality for us mainstream users I often thought (just for a little fun) of rewriting my old code to take advantage of this

- like I said, this is pure academic curiosity as I still have the old training dataset and results (part of my thesis paper) and it would be a blast to see the orders of magnitude differences

- architecturally I would want to run the main net driver on a single core and dynamically balance the network layer execution without spinning up too many threads and ending up competing for the very same resource, that being CPU cycles given how compute intensive net training is

...yeah, that's all! 

10

Programming / DosSetThreadAffinity - process or thread only?

« on: October 19, 2024, 02:52:52 pm »

Trying to learn a bit about SMP capabilities on our platform and I would like to understand the functionality of the DosSetThreadAffinity API.

The Toolkit 'Programming Guide and Reference Addendum' states "...DosSetThreadAffinity allows the calling thread to change the processor affinity mask for the current thread...", so this very much feels like THREAD only control for the current thread I am in, as in: executing right now.

In the meantime, I am curious if this can be applied to a process, and by default all of it's threads?

Further on, could I develop a system driver which would enforce the execution of specific programs (i.e. processes) on a specific CPU/core of a SMP system?

The example code shown in the addendum is:

Code: [Select]

#define INCL_DOS
#define INCL_32
#define INCL_DOSERRORS
#define INCL_NOPMAPI
#include <os2.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
APIRET rc;
MPAFFINITY affinity;

rc = DosSetThreadAffinity(affinity);
printf("Set thread's affinity rc = %08.8xh\n", rc);
printf("Set thread's affinity affinity[0] = %08.8xh, affinity[1] = %08.8xh\n",
        affinity.mask[0], affinity.mask[1]);
return rc;
}

Given what is shown above, and the fact that no 'target THREAD' parameter is provided, I conclude that indeed this API will only control the current thread.

Any ideas where else I could dig up some info on this and the DosQueryThreadAffinity APIs?

Thanks, as always!

11

Applications / Re: Newb question

« on: October 14, 2024, 05:23:57 am »

DOS Window doesn’t show a directory and some files I downloaded. Yet OS/2 window does?

What am I doing wrong?

8.3 char filename limitation?

12

Internet / Re: HTTPS server?

« on: October 04, 2024, 03:54:42 pm »

Hey Neil,

...With a current apache port from Paul, why would you look at anything else?

Mostly because prior to this thread here, and the background research, I knew absolutely nothing about the state of 'commercial grade' http servers on our platform...thus the general "HTTPS server" post in here.

13

Internet / Re: HTTPS server?

« on: October 04, 2024, 03:11:02 pm »

Thanks for the feedback you guys!

OK, a few more questions:

1) IBM HTTP Server for OS/2
- does anyone know if this supports https? it does support secure connections....and I think this what will enable the https functionality (but, as you can tell, this is not my 'forte' lol)
- this is based on Apache 1.3.12, and Paul's last Apache release is 2.4.52, so I'm guessing if I was to pursue this approach I should be just moving directly to your release instead?

2) BM WebSphere Application Server Standard Edition Version 3
- this seems like overkill for what I want to do
- release notes state it requires 'Lotus Domino Go Web Server Version 4.6.2.6 or later', althoug reading through the release notes I found that the IBM HTTP Server can be used instead of the 'Lotus Domino Go Web Server'

3) Lotus Domino Server 5.0.11
- this is a whole communication suite, so an way too big for my needs

I have all of the above as old downloads that were part of the Warp Professional Services subscription...so they are just sitting there, but I am hesitant to get into these w/o knowing more about their suitability.

#1 is based on the Apache stuff from way back in the day...so it seems like the most suitable choice?

EDIT
====
Reading through the release notes for all of the above I answered some questions, so there are a few updates interspersed throughout the above points.

14

Internet / HTTPS server?

« on: October 02, 2024, 03:05:54 am »

I'm using Peter Moylan's excellent WebServe 2.4 at the moment to host a few of my thigns, but given the whole move from http to https, I started to think it would be nice to look into this further (have heard some complaints from people that they can't get to my stuff).

Sooo...what are our choices besides the Apache stuff?

15

Internet / Re: firefox question

« on: September 28, 2024, 02:45:06 pm »

Hi ivan,

...Now to find out how to auto clear it when firefox closes and I will be happy...

What has always worked for me was bringing up the GUI setup screens (so within FF: Tools => Options => Advanced => Network => Cached Web Content) and selecting the 'Clean Now' button.

FF does some internal house-keeping, so this (also depending on how BIG your current cache is) may take a minute or two, but in my case I always do this when I run a quarterly backup of my FF profile (no sense copying all that cache right? LOL).

BUT...if you want an automated way of doing this, I think Dave's suggestion to put the cache on the ramdisk is just about the only viable option?