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Messages - Rich Walsh

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91
Setup & Installation / Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« on: October 31, 2023, 05:54:55 am »
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.

92
Setup & Installation / Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« on: October 30, 2023, 09:27:43 pm »
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.

93
Setup & Installation / Re: UEFI: Dual Boot - Windows 11 and ArcaOS 5.1
« on: October 29, 2023, 05:25:25 am »
In my experience, rEFInd works really good with ArcaOS.

reFind is very nice - I used it before AN Launcher was written. IIRC it has an option to scan all disks for bootable partitions and may workaround the problem.

Here's another workaround that I think is far easier: just switch the boot order in the firmware so that the SATA drive boots first, then add AN Launcher to that disk's ESP.

* open MiniLVM and assign each of your two ESPs a drive letter (say, U: and V:)
* on the menu, select System->Boot Menu->Update/Install
* select the ESP partition on the SATA drive
* save your changes then boot into the firmware/BIOS
* change the boot order for hard drives so the SATA drive is first
* when you exit the firmware, it should boot AN Launcher on the SATA drive

If the Launcher menu doesn't have an entry for Win11, boot into AOS. Open Drive U: or V: (whichever is on the SATA), then open \EFI\BOOT\LAUNCHER.CFG. In the [menu] section, add "Win11 = \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi". Save, then reboot and see if the copy of Win on the SATA boots.

94
Setup & Installation / Re: UEFI: Dual Boot - Windows 11 and ArcaOS 5.1
« on: October 28, 2023, 04:25:31 am »
Attaching the SATA disk does not get an automatic entry in AN Launcher or either Windows Boot Managers.

AN Launcher is very low-function - by design - so there was never the slightest possibility that it would add an entry on its own. I had hoped for more from Win's Boot Manager but no such luck - it's far worse. You''ll have to used 'bcdedit' when booted to a Windows command line to add an entry.

Quote
I guess I need to ask AN how to get the SATA Windows installation to boot from AN Launcher if I decide to use the SATA disk.

Good luck on that...  In my earlier posting I left out all the ugly details in an attempt to keep it simple. Since that didn't work out, here's an introduction to harsh reality:

AN Launcher is incapable of running an .EFI file located on another disk because it doesn't know how to parse a UEFI disk identifier. If you look at 'launcher.cfg', you'll see that all paths start at the root directory of the _current_ disk. For example:
  Win11 = \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi

If you wanted it to reference another disk, it would have to look something like this:
  Win11 = HD(2,GPT,9f11367c-448a-4272-92b8-af7e9c01973c,800,82000)\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi
Even if AN Launcher could parse this, you'd have a lot of fun trying to construct it.

In any case, industry-standard practice is to have only one EFI System Partition (ESP) and to rely on each bootloader to know how to navigate multiple disks on its own terms - and all of them do. As such, there's no reason to have multiple bootloaders for a single OS. (FYI: while OS/2's boot manager and osloader are separate binaries, grub and WinBM act as both boot manager and osloader.)

Compunding the problem further: UEFI has a builtin boot manager (that's what you're looking at when you go into the firmware). If you believe the specs, you should be able to add entries that point at any disk, and the firmware should boot them in the specified order (i.e. if the first entry fails to boot, it moves on to the next one). Sadly, that isn't the way many manufacturers have implemented it. If you're booting from Disk 1, Lenovo, Dell, and others will try all of the entries that reference Disk 1 before they ever try Disk 2. Consequently, putting an entry for Disk 2 at the top of the list has no effect because the firmware will (likely) find something bootable on Disk 1. This is the underlying reason for that "industry-standard practice" of having a single ESP which is always on the first disk: to workaround non-compliant firmware.

If you decide you still want to use the SATA drive, I'd suggest you use Bing to search for "add OS to Windows Boot Manager" for instructions on how to use 'bcdedit.exe' (there are also some 3rd-party BCD editors available to ease the pain).

95
Programming / Re: shared memory value - Odin win32k or DosQuerySysInfo???
« on: October 28, 2023, 01:52:18 am »
Here are screenshots of the final(?) product.

'mmap-v085.png' shows the widget and its details window which you can toggle on/off by clicking the widget.

 'mmap-v085-props.png' shows the Properties dialog which offers "live" updates (i.e. drop a color, the graph changes immediately). It also demonstrates that you can move the window elsewhere if needed - doing so will display an 'X'  button to make closing it easier.

This will probably show up in the XWP that follows the soon-to-be-released v1.0.16.

96
Setup & Installation / Re: UEFI: Dual Boot - Windows 11 and ArcaOS 5.1
« on: October 26, 2023, 05:45:38 am »
How do I setup AN Launcher on the NVMe drive to boot the Windows11 install on SATA1?
Do I simply copy the SATA1 \EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi to NVMe \EFI\Boot\winx64.efi or id there some other tweak needed?

My best _guess_ (since I haven't tested this) is don't do anything except attach the SATA drive. Most definitely, do not go moving .EFI files around.

Remember that you are not booting Windows per se, you are booting the Windows Boot Manager and _it_ is booting Win. Either it will discover the new copy on its own or you'll have to add it (however that's done). This is little different than booting one or more versions of Linux via 'grub'.

97
Setup & Installation / Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« on: October 20, 2023, 01:11:46 am »
I can try that util Rich if you want to share it.

I sent you a PM with a link to it.

Quote
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.

98
Setup & Installation / Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« on: October 19, 2023, 11:42:05 pm »
Initdisk gave me the "broken header 2" error that I got from my first attempt (I selected GPT)

If you'd like I can PM you my 'mkgpt' utility that was supposed to go into 5.1 but got replaced by 'initdisk'. I _know_ that this one works (for me at least), so if bombs out then you have a disk issue.

99
Programming / Re: shared memory value - Odin win32k or DosQuerySysInfo???
« on: October 18, 2023, 07:10:41 pm »
running your monitor and comparing it's output to the likes of 'Free Shared Mem' util, or Alex's 'mem', I am not quite seeing the same numbers.

First off, my apologies. A dumb arithmetic error gave you 512mb more high memory than you actually have. The attached 'memry07.zip' fixes the error.

Quote
This is pretty neat stuff. I have been dreaming of building a GUI "browser" that basically visually maps the current memory utilization, goal being: make it human digestable!!!

That's been my goal as well which is why I've spent the last few days working on my "memap" XCenter widget. Below are some screenshots: the widget at its default size (nice and small), the widget expanded for greater visibility, and the widget showing its details window. Since you may want to monitor the details as you open and close stuff, I've made the details window movable so you move it elsewhere to keep it from getting covered. Note that this is a work-in-progress and subject to change (in particular, the details window).

BTW... the scaling for high and low memory differs. For low memory (bottom line) each box represents 64k. For high mem (top line) each box is total_high_mem / 8. Because I have 2gb of high mem, each box is 256mb; if you have 1gb, each box would be 128k.

Edit: added a screenshot of an alternate layout for the Details window. Which one is better?

100
Utilities / Re: How to change several files "Class Type" in one shot
« on: October 15, 2023, 05:49:38 am »
Rich, [...] will it be ok to package (add some readme info, etc) your releases and upload them to hobbes?

Thanks for the offer, but "No, please don't". The same goes for 'csm2uefi' and other things I may post here.

Most of this stuff was created either in response to a particular user's needs (in this case, yours) or to some short-term need (e.g. csm2uefi), and isn't ready and/or suitable for widespread distribution. When it is (if ever), I will handle the details.

101
Utilities / Re: How to change several files "Class Type" in one shot
« on: October 13, 2023, 09:48:11 pm »
It works, but only for single files, it does not support wildcards.

BMP2DATA.CMD
------------------
oo /+
for %%1 in (*.bmp) do oo /B %%1 WPDataFile
oo /-
------------------

102
Utilities / Re: How to change several files "Class Type" in one shot
« on: October 13, 2023, 05:30:26 am »
Attached is 'oo' v1.15 which now offers a "Become" command.

If you are running AOS, you already have 'oo' v1.10 in x:\sys\bin. Backup that copy (just in case), then replace it with this version. If not, download RWS v0.80 from hobbes, install it, then replace its copy of 'oo' with this one.

The syntax for the new command is:  oo  /B  <file>  <className | file2>

Supply the name of the file or folder to be changed, then specify either the name of the new class _or_ the name of a file or folder that is already the class you want. If successful, 'oo' will change the class, update the '.TYPE' EA as needed, and reset the object to the class' default view.

Run 'oo' with no arguments to get its help screen. Refer to 'oo.txt' for more details (on AOS, it's in 'x:\sys\doc\oo').

103
Hardware / Re: Lenovo IdeaPad 120S-141AP and ArcaOS 5.0.7?
« on: October 10, 2023, 10:28:20 am »
I tried the USB optical drive again

ArcaOS can NOT be installed using a USB DVD drive. You must create a USB boot stick using ".\dfsanwin.exe -q run aosboot.dfs" from Win if you don't have an existing OS/2 installation. However...

All this effort may be for naught. I looked at the BIOS simulator that Martin linked to. It suggests that the machine has an EMMC drive (typical for tablets) and not a conventional hard drive. If so, this machine is not supported. AOS has drivers for PATA, SATA, and NVME drives but not EMMC.

104
Programming / Re: shared memory value - Odin win32k or DosQuerySysInfo???
« on: September 30, 2023, 10:35:34 am »
Attached is an update to 'memry' that now displays both high and low memory usage. Start it before opening your browser, then watch its numbers change when you open it. Here's my before and after with Dooble.


105
Programming / Re: WPS dragged object handle
« on: September 29, 2023, 10:51:36 pm »
I am trying to identify the object that is being dragged over my window [...]

There is a value in ulItemID, put there either by the WPS or xWorkplaceShell when a WPProgram type object is being dragged. Anyone know what that value is?

For items that identify themselves as "<DRM_OBJECT,DRF_OBJECT>" ulItemID is a pointer to the object's container record. This is very useful within the WPS process but useless outside it. Indeed, there's nothing in a DRAGITEM that gives any hint as to the type of object being dragged other than to identify whether it's a file (e.g. "<DRM_OS2FILE,DRF_TEXT>"),

The only way I know of to get info about a WPS object from outside the WPS process is to use RWS. It allows you to call into the WPS using that ulItemID to query the object's attributes, execute its methods, and generally do whatever you want to inside the WPS. My only concern in this case is that it may have too much overhead to use it "live" during a drag.

FYI... RWS's runtime DLLs are included in all releases of AOS. For development, you will need the full package: https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/download/pub/os2/dev/libraries/SOM/RWS_0-80.zip

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