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Messages - Roderick Klein

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16
Events / Re: Warpstock 2025 USA - The end of my journey with ArcaOS
« on: November 16, 2025, 10:09:25 pm »
Hello
wished i was a programmer to contribute to the development of a WIFI-driver.
What about the idea to start a project to develop one together - online with the help of all who have the knowledge, time and interest - step by step. Would that be feasible?

Even that the Andi B's comments are right, I was wondering if a more dirty/non-elengant/hack aproach can be worked out to have wifi drivers with less effort. Like just focusing on some basic wifi first and maybe not fully functional first. Maybe going back the 32bits windriver wrapper idea, or focusing on some USB wifi dongles.

Regards

Read my lengthy reply to Sigurd if it was all that simple, really I wish it was. Sadly its not.  I have been looking at all of this.

What we need understand as community is what I described below:

You effectively have two approaches.

1. Port a driver, copy paste chunks and get a driver.

2. Come up with library or wrapper that does this.  This what David tried twice with Linux and FreeBSD.  But it backfired because simply a case of badluck. The bad luck that Linux changest the kernel somehow and then it happened again with FreeBSD.

The win32 wrapper is complete dead end. Simply because no more 32 bit drivers are being made for Windows. You know when Willebald Meyer created Genmac it was a lot of work I am not discounting that at all. But to some degree he also got lucky and here is why. The NDIS network stack on OS/2 and Windows where pretty close (no surprise of course).
One of the changes is that NDIS stack on Windows started to change that much (and the driver as well). To an extend keeping Genmac up with the changes on Windows became to much for one person to keep up with.

I wonder if people even fully grasp the parallels between Multimac and Genmac. To put it differently Willibald Meyer looked a generic solution to not write the drivers.
But wrote drivers to support the Windows drivers. My conclusion Genmac stopped working simply because the technical changes between Windows and OS/2 become to big.
ReactOS I think also only supports 32 bit wifi drivers, not 64 bit.

ReactOS seems be in the same boot as we are.

https://reactos.org/wiki/Supported_Hardware/Wireless_Network_cards

Roderick


17
Events / Re: Warpstock 2025 USA - The end of my journey with ArcaOS
« on: November 16, 2025, 05:31:08 pm »
First of all I listened to many hours of the Warpstock stream and I do not think that Lewis said it such a way as one line answer. Like ooh who needs Wifi, in my opinion Sigurd did not picked up the message 100% correctly.  David mentioned if he could hand over to another developer he would welcome that.  He did not state (from what I heard) he would stop development.

And while I perfectly understand everybody is entitled to his opinion and call stuff excuses.  They way I understand the idea is Arca Noae works on drivers to keep ArcaOS to boot on new hardware. And that is logic order in my opinion. So as David and Lewis mentioned. IBMKBD.SYS was updated to support systems without a 8042 controller, we take NVME support for granted. USB 3.0 took waaaay longer then every expected. And now David is working an update to ACPI as discussed by Dmitry.  And why do we not have Wifi drivers.

We you can port drivers to another OS in two ways.

1. You rewrite the code to match OS/2. from Linux/FreeBSD that is very, very time consuming.

2. The second option is that you write a driver library so you work more efficiently.

Option two we started with when David still worked on eCS at Mensys and worked on the Multimac driver system. With library he could with almost changing no code and push out Linux kernel NIC support on OS/2 within a few hours per driver.  Work was resumed to push this towards Linux and when it was not far from being finished. Well the Linux guys changest the kernel in such a way that broke the Multimac library to a high degree.  And that was the end of the dream of portable wifi drivers, blown. I once heard from David at one of the Warpstocks
then one binary for the Wifi Intel driver (that not working yet, it was not finished). One binary was 400 KB in size. I think that is just the size Uniaud32.sys.
Wifi drivers are so waaaay, waaaay much more complicated then ethernet drivers.

So after the Linux option went away David started from scratch on Freebsd. Some concept but it takes time to build such library. Every call the driver source make need to mapped somehow to work on OS/2.  So ethernet drivers started to appear. And when stuff got closer for Wifi with a FreeBSD library well the FreeBSD modified the kernel sources.

Now David his work to port the 2.5 gigabit drivers is slowed down also as he encounters option 1 I mentioned. Porting code. All of that is way more labor intensive.
So for people to sit there that nothing was done on wifi drivers etc.

Cutting long story short. Serious efforts where made for wifi drivers and mostly failed because of bad luck. If Linux or FreeBSD did not modify its kernel sources we would have had the wifi drivers. Indeed wifi drivers are one of the most complex driver types around just about. Panorama, AHCI, NVME, ACPI and USB is so much easier, but why is that ? Well the interfaces are to high degree standard.

Now porting the new Intel and Realtek ethernet drivers might also take longer because of the same changes to FreeBSD kernel.
Its not recompiling the code....

Just my humble opinion.

Roderick

18
Applications / Re: OS2VOICE RPM - ...and MMOS2 Updater
« on: November 13, 2025, 05:35:51 pm »
The repodata is still broken. This is server side issue.
This will be looked at later. But you can download via rpm.os2voice.org with a browser.
Remember you can also need to download and install the CWMM 031 WPI next to this one. Otherwhise Timidity will not work.

I am currently dealing with some health issue so not online much.

Roderick

19
Setup & Installation / Re: Installing ZipCntrl
« on: September 02, 2025, 01:44:58 pm »
Did did it work on eComStation ?

I think I might have an idea what is going on.

Roderick Klein

20
Internet / Re: Mypal68: A possible alternative browser?
« on: August 29, 2025, 12:27:16 am »
here is another 32 bit browser recently appeared:
 "Supermium is a Chromium-based web browser designed to support older Windows versions while offering enhanced security, performance, and customization options"
Now, said that my knowledge in porting software is near to zero and this browser fits to Windows only, it raise to me two basic user questions:

- Chromium is open source - multi platform browser ?
- does multiplatform browser 32 bit means theoretically portable in OS2/ArcaOS ?

even if I realize that both "yes" answers do not mean automatically that it can be simply ported to OS2/ArcaOS, I'd like to learn -if possible-  comments from you.

https://www.supermium.org/

their contact email has a funny address : emmawatsofficial54@gmail.com

and the street address 1600 Grand Avenue, London, NW1 6XE, UK  brings several companies link if you research it by Google.
Most of them shares same email address : prorevitaa@gmail.co  , but some others also have emmawatsofficial54@gmail.com.

who are them ?

https://github.com/win32ss/supermium

provided by

https://win32subsystem.live/

please donate to

https://www.patreon.com/win32

......

Its a fair question and it comes up more often. But the first issue with such a port is that its missing OS/2 specific code. I do not know how much work it would be to apply the patches from a Firefox browser to get to compile or write code. (A none Firefox or QT based browser port to OS/2 is a none starter in my mind).

We have something like WINE for OS/2 called ODIN, a system that can run Windows sources on OS/2. But yet again this was last updated oooh 20 years ago. Using Wine is most likely a none starter and debugging the code will be pretty time consuming in my opinion. So we are back to porting the code as the option above.

But even when you get the platform specific code added to the current code base of any browser then the debugging starts.  A compiling browser is not a warranty for a stable browser.
Now I only skimmed the pages of this browser but what do I see:
https://github.com/win32ss/supermium
There is a V8 directory. V8 is a javascript engine also used by the current Dooble browser.
That is one of the things Dmitry is going to work on again to fix (from BWW).

So its possible if you port this browser we bump into the same V8 issue.

Also thinking more about this I think this talk about a 32 bit browser is partly, well not very helpfull. You can maybe trim the memory usage but the other issue is that webpages have become WAAAAY more complicated in terms of code your PC and how much CPU is needed to display it on your system.  I am not saying a 32 bit OS is not useable with an older CPU. But a 32 bit browser still needs memory to store the webpages.

My overall assessment is that with the limited human resources we have in the OS/2 community its a waste of time to look at other browsers to port. We would simply be spinning our wheels.
I am gladd to be proven wrong.  Any port would take 1 person full time and take about 1 year at least to get something workable (beta stage). And it might even be much longer!

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE



21
Hardware / Re: SNAP Driver Source
« on: August 23, 2025, 04:47:36 pm »
Quote
I can not find any references to other BIOS settings related to CSM support in this specific case that indicates you can still BOOT a CSM OS.
You see next to the BIOS having CSM support you must have drivers that support the new hardware.

I am not sure what they mean there - or where it says it only supports 64 bit operating systems.
The manuals don't give very much information on CSM  - or in some cases any information at all.

With my AM4 socket MSI motherboard the way you choose whether to boot UEFI or CSM mode is through the BIOS boot menu - I suspect it is the same with AM5 socket boards.   Basically each media that is attached when the machine turns on is listed twice: once with a UEFI tag and again without the UEFI tag.  If you pick the media with the UEFI tag you boot in UEFI mode, otherwise you boot in CSM mode.  This isn't described in the manual.  With the other two manufacturers I had to look on forums where people posted about problems booting CSM or UEFI to find out that the board supported CSM.

With the choices between UEFI and CSM, MBR verses GPT, and how UEFI vs CSM affects the capabilities of both SNAP and Panorama, along with DOS and/or Win-OS/2,  setting up a system is now a very complex undertaking.

Making an educated guess based on what is written it means you can for example use PCI cards that still have legacy support. Such as an old video card.

As I typed before as time moves on supporting CSM for old operating systems makes less and less sense. This because the mainboard vendor has to have drivers from the companies that make the chipsets, for example. video, audio etc.  I would be surprised if all of these mainboards could support Windows 7 for example. Hence the reason vendors will just dump CSM support.
Unless you buy a legacy refurbished system or with a industrial mainboard (but these can be expensive).

When it comes to the choice between GPT versus MBR on UEFI boot. Always grab GPT when booting an MBR system.  If you currently have a working MBR just jeep it. But in my experience MBR is fragile and especially LVM from OS/2. The genereal rule of thumb is you should ONLY use disc tools that run under OS/2 to edit your disc.  Not doing so can bring you into problems.
Especially if you want to setup a dual boot system. The design of GPT is simply more modern and less fragile.  Other people who have installed a dual boot with Windows 10 or Windows 11 on GPT I think will confirm it was never easier.

The headache is indeed with SNAP. Then you need a working mainboard with a CSM.

Roderick

22
Hardware / Re: Soundblaster Live 1024 drivers
« on: August 23, 2025, 04:31:18 pm »
I wanted to avoid UNIAUD, because I have big problems with my development machine.
I don't know, if it the driver or the HW in my T480, but I wanted to try "native" drivers.

Well describe what the issue is. We are not people with remote viewing skills that can read your mind or your computer.
So perhaps try to describe what the issue is.

Is UNIAUD perfect, perhaps its not. But so far its the only audio driver we have on ArcaOS/OS/2 and its the best debugged one.

The old SB live driver has different bugs and I would strongly recommend to NOT use it.

Roderick

23
Hardware / Re: SNAP Driver Source
« on: August 20, 2025, 08:10:40 pm »
Roderick,

That appears to be true for Intel CPU based motherboards, but does not appear to be true for AMD CPU based motherboards - at least for today.

I went to Microcenter.com (a big, national, US computer retailer/superstore) and searched for AM5 socket motherboards.  AM5 is the latest AMD socket for its processors.  AMD has announced it will support AM5 socket until 2027.  I took the first 3 motherboards from different manufacturers and checked if they had CSM - all three did.  Those motherboards are MSI MAG X870E Tomahawk Wifi, ASUS B650A ROG Strix, and Gigabyte X870E AORUS Elite.

I have no idea about that state of CSM support in laptops.

Interesting. From a commercial perspective for normal mainboards there is 0 need to support CSM.  The last version of Windows to support CSM boot is Windows 10 32 bit.
And that has gone long out of support.

https://download-2.msi.com/archive/mnu_exe/mb/MAGX870ETOMAHAWKWIFI_English.pdf
On page 68 it says:
However, it still has a CSM (Compatibility Support Module) mode to be
compatible with older devices.

32-bit Windows operating system - this motherboard supports only Windows 11
64-bit operating system.

I can not find any references to other BIOS settings related to CSM support in this specific case that indicates you can still BOOT a CSM OS.
You see next to the BIOS having CSM support you must have drivers that support the new hardware.

So it all look pretty grim in my opinion. But I would not be surprised if some mainbords are still around with CSM.

Roderick Klein



24
Hardware / Re: SNAP Driver Source
« on: August 20, 2025, 07:30:18 am »
Rodrick,

I am attaching a screen shot of a seamless win-os/2 application at 3840x1080, and a pic of a full-screen win-os/2 session running at 3840x1080, both using SNAP.

As for GRADD and how SNAP and Win-OS/2 works - and for that fact BIOS/CSM  - I am no expert.  I'm just Ken (and I am not even blond.)

The limitation for SNAP seems to be in the vertical direction rather than the horizontal direction.  I am guessing this is due to the fact that support for new chipsets ended before DisplayPort became common and so we are bound by the display resolution limitations of DVI. 

The graphical performance of seamless, and full-screen Win-os/2 sessions, seems to be fine.  The card I am using (Radeon X600) is a first generation PCIe but it seems to have more than enough performance for OS/2.  I am not counting frame rates or running games - I am judging by how fast text scrolls, how responsive window dragging is, and how many movies I am play on VLC at the same time (it is at least 4 - the limitations appear to be VLC related rather than graphics performance)

As for CSM/BIOS/CPU - once again I'm just Ken.  There are lots of links about Intel and CSM - including this one

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/630266/removal-of-legacy-boot-support-for-intel-platforms-technical-advisory.html

A couple of weeks ago I was wondering the same question as you asked - is it the CPU or the BIOS/motherboard that determines CSM support - so I looked at some new Intel based motherboards from MSI, Gigibyte and ASUS to see if the new boards have CSM support.  I could not find any mention of CSM in the manuals for the motherboards, or listed on their web sites.  This of course is not conclusive, either for the BIOS verses CPU question or for whether CSM is now gone from Intel based motherboards. 

But if CSM is now discontinued for Intel based systems it might drive some OS/2 users to AMD based systems - especially those who need DOS/Windows support and/or are using older hardware that really requires BIOS support - such as some graphics tablets, etc.  Right now it appears that we need CSM for Panorama to access the full range of color depth and/or resolutions that are available on modern monitors/video cards.

Interesting thank you for this screenshot never seen WIN/OS2 on two screens spread out.


Since circa 2022 No mainboards or PC are made with a CSM. Except for legacy PC's or industrial mainboards.

Roderick Klein

25
Hardware / Re: SNAP Driver Source
« on: August 17, 2025, 11:25:28 pm »
The big benefit of SNAP for me is that currently SNAP is the only way (that I know of) of getting Win-OS/2 to reliably work on a screen size larger than 1920x1080. Which in my case is SNAP with a dual monitor setup running 3840x1080  (I don't have two monitors that will display larger than 1920x1080.  I do have a single 4k monitor).

Because of AndiB's post on 4k screen sizes awhile back, I purchased a Sapphire pulse RX 550 video card (from England - the shipping was more than the card)  to see if I could get it to work on my Ryzen.  What I found (on the Ryzen with RX550 video card and virtual address limit = 2048) was:

1) you have to boot as CSM in order to set colors to something less than 16M.  64K colors seems to work well. 16M colors not so good.
(first screen shot - the card name shows up as LEXA for some reason).  Win-OS/2 will not work

2) If you boot as UEFI you can only use 16M colors - there is no other color option and I did not get custom resolutions to work.  I did not try messing with virtual address limit

3)  with UEFI boot  (and 16M colors) you can get Win-OS/2 to work - but not very well.
On the second screen shot you can see the screen not getting updated correctly - noticeable for example below the "Initializing" text in the grey window at the lower left of the
Visual Builder screen.

4)  There are some Win-OS/2 apps, like Paint Brush, that won't work correctly at 16M colors, even with SNAP.

5) The type of video "connection" used makes a difference.  Even though the RX550 video card supports both HDMI and DisplayPort, and my monitor supports both connections, 4k will only work on with a DisplayPort connection.  I also tried hooking up a 4K TV via HDMI and it will not display 4K for Panorama even though the TV and video card say they support HDMI at 60 HZ.  This was also true when testing with an Intel i5 8600 with integrated UHD graphics 630, which also supports HDMI, DisplayPort and VGA.

6) for the Intel (virtual address limit = 1536)  I had the same issue of needing to boot CSM in order to set the colors at something other the 16M, and the resolution at something other than 640x480.
When booting CSM WIn-OS/2 will not work in seamless mode, but will work in full screen. OS/2 seemed to work correctly - although I didn't do extensive testing.
(screen shot 3)

When booting the Intel in UEFI - at 16M colors and 640x480 (the only color and resolution choice) - Win-OS/2 would work in seamless mode and full screen.

There are some points to remember:

The older Radeon video cards that will work with SNAP are probably not going to be GOP enabled - meaning they won't work unless CSM is on, and the AOS installer will not work with them.  They will work fine once AOS is installed and with CSM support turned on.

Intel has removed CSM support from most of its processors by now.  AMD is removing CSM support from its graphics video cards starting at the Radeon 9000, but appears to be keeping CSM for its processors, at least at this point.

I was thinking of doing this a presentation at Warpstock Little Rock if you guys think anyone would be interested.

CSM  has not been removed from the CPU its the BIOS that provides this support in conjunction with the video card.

I am not certain that SNAP goes ALL the way to 3840 x ???? resolution. With waht I know about the GRADD architecture WIN/OS2 depends on the GRADD component and not the accelrated SNAP portion of the code. But I could be wrong. Can you post a screenshot of your WIN/OS2 screen as I think the resolution support of WIN/OS2 can be increased that high.

Roderick


26
Virtualization / Re: Win-OS/2 - Open vbesvga.drv video driver
« on: August 16, 2025, 11:45:50 pm »
Hi Doug

It is good that you see at least the mouse improvement in Win-OS/2 full screen session. I don't know if this improves something on the DOS VDM, I don't think so, but I may be wrong.

By any chance did you tried the vio-1.0.wpi patch and try if it works for your windowed sessions?
- https://mantis.arcanoae.com/view.php?id=1193
Does this patch applies today with ArcaOS 5.1.1 ?

Just in case, I have some personal notes and links here:
- https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php?title=DOS_and/or_WIN-OS/2_Sessions_Problems_on_ArcaOS

There is also this from Arca Noae:
Quote
If you have a need for DOS and/or Win-OS/2 sessions you will need to install ArcaOS in UEFI mode so that the installer will install a compatible VESA emulator. You could disable the CSM (legacy support) in the BIOS settings, or just make sure the system boots the installer in UEFI mode.
Source: https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/arcaos/known-issues/#doswin

Regards

That VIO patch is only for an extremely small subset of Thinkpad systems and in genereal should not be installed on any other systems.

Roderick

27
Hardware / Re: SNAP Driver Source
« on: August 14, 2025, 08:43:45 pm »
To Andi B.
What is the current status of widescreen activation? => custom videomodes
* it's necessary use ati amd radeon ?
* nvidia allows use custom modes?
* Intel video cards - custom modes?

In a lot of cases the wide screen activators on modern systems no longer work (UEFI).
Panorama has the code for ATI and Intel build in.
On UEFI systems you already get with laptops a lot of high screen resolutions where its a question if you still need the wide screen enabler.

Remember UEFI GOP is ONLY a memory address to write no other screen features etc.

Roderick Klein

28
Hardware / Re: SNAP Driver Source
« on: August 14, 2025, 08:33:08 pm »
...Dariusz for example uses an X850 IIRC and has a dual monitor setup...

For what it's worth, I cannot even imagine a Desktop environment with a single display anymore. The fact that I can enjoy such a hardware setup on our OS/2 platform is THE reason why I will continue to use SNAP.

...
I used the X300 mit dual monitor setup (2x 1920x1200) many years. For the newer system I have to put in a ATI 550 which after some work from David A. (ticket) could drive my new 42,5" 3840x2160 monitor with nativ resolution using Panorama. Intel integrated couldn't be convinced to do it right.

Now again about 8-10 years later my current system could not drive this resolution with current Panorama using AMD internal GPU. Additional ATI550 can be convinced to setup the right resolution. But then I've to set Virtualaddresslimit<=1536 as otherwise the system crashes immediately. But that's no useful option for me.

So after about 15-17 years using OS/2 with 3840x >=1200 I now have to switch to another primary OS. Or live with crappy 2560x1440 displayed on a 3840x2160 screen. :-( Or hope David accidently can fixes this memory problem.

I have seen your ticket. I will mention this to Steve Levine if he can find out what is going on!

Roderick

29
Hardware / Re: SNAP Driver Source
« on: August 13, 2025, 04:51:20 pm »
** This question is not meant in a negative way towards Arca Noae **

I noticed this article:
https://www.arcanoae.com/arca-noae-licenses-snap-graphics-os2-code/
 from 2015

It do not remember seeing, a lot of use of this source code to expand the drivers to newer chips sets, instead more of a focus on vesa as a write once, run anywhere solution. 

Just curious as to what happened/how that works, as I remember the early days of graphics chips having 100's of pages of manual explaining how to program them, then came CGA/Hercules - again with lots of, even bigger manuals explaining how to program them, then EGA - with even bigger books, then finally, I don't own a copy, but one really thick book on programming the 'VGA' chip.

Now, I don't know how programmers learn about the capabilities of various graphics chips, which continue to develop at a breakneck pace, both Nvidia, Intel and AMD.

From what I understand its very simple. Simply a lack of human resources.

Current chipsets no longer really comply with well a standard. You have UEFI GOP but this is effectively a frame buffer address to write to.

If you want to know how chipsets work in native mode you need to read Linux/FreeBSD code or Spec sheets. Its all extremely time consuming.
And then you have one chipset! In daily live the return on investment for SNAP on modern hardware, you will most likely not even notice it really that you are running Panorama.
Primary interests to have SNAP: Change output port on a laptop to HDMI for example or to have 2 screens connected.

Other then that I am afraid SNAP is currently frozen in time.

Roderick Klein


30
Storage / Re: USB Floppy Drive Setup.
« on: August 12, 2025, 02:23:48 pm »
Interesting its not turned on by default floppies:1. It should be plug and play.

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