OS2 World Community Forum

OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical => Setup & Installation => Topic started by: christech on October 10, 2023, 07:08:28 pm

Title: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on October 10, 2023, 07:08:28 pm
Hey all,

My ArcaOS 5.1 machine has started to get sluggish. Not sure what I can check. For example, opening Drives takes 10 seconds to show the drives, Firefox takes 30 seconds to open.. etc.

Machine is a Dell Precision T3610:

4 Core XEON E5-1603 @ 2.80 Ghz
4 GB RAM
500GB 7200 RPM Mechanical Drive in AHCI mode

I turned off all Virtualization in BIOS.

I don't know what to look for, or where to start. Any help is appreciated.


Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Dave Yeo on October 10, 2023, 07:41:16 pm
CPU overheating, due to dirt/bad fan/thermal paste going bad? HD dying?
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Pete on October 10, 2023, 09:44:24 pm
Hi

Like Dave I suggest checking for "dust bunnies" in cpu fan as a likely cause.

Another possibility which has caught me out in the past is PSU starting to fail - usually due to overheating/dust buildup.

On the software side it could be worth running cleanini - http://www.os2site.com/sw/util/ini/cleanini55.zip - followed by checkini, part of WPTools, as sometimes sluggish behaviour can be INI file related.
Still worth checking dust buildup inside case and PSU though...

Regards

Pete
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on October 10, 2023, 11:31:45 pm
It's clean in there. I cleaned it out 3 months ago. I did a full diagnostic from the built-in Dell diagnostics. All tests passed on thorough mode.. took a few hours.  The mechanical drive is new.

I will check out the INI file cleaner. One idea I thought about was to get a small SSD and install the ArcaOS UEFI version to the SSD and move my system files over to the SSD and use the 500GB as a storage drive.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Pete on October 11, 2023, 12:58:35 am
Hi christech

I moved Windows7, 3 ArcaOS versions (boot drives) and my OS/2 Apps drives from a 1Tb "spinner" to SSD and found systems boot a little quicker and apps load faster.

OTOH: My new system has an NVMe drive and that is much faster than SSD  :-)


Regards

Pete
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Roderick Klein on October 11, 2023, 01:35:03 am
Hey all,

My ArcaOS 5.1 machine has started to get sluggish. Not sure what I can check. For example, opening Drives takes 10 seconds to show the drives, Firefox takes 30 seconds to open.. etc.

Machine is a Dell Precision T3610:

4 Core XEON E5-1603 @ 2.80 Ghz
4 GB RAM
500GB 7200 RPM Mechanical Drive in AHCI mode

I turned off all Virtualization in BIOS.

I don't know what to look for, or where to start. Any help is appreciated.

This sudden issue indeed sounds like a hard drive ready to kick the can!
You do not need to turn off virtualisation. If your BIOS has a setting for hyperthreading turn that off.
But again the fact  it starts to get sluggish all of a sudden is bad sign,,,


Roderick
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Dave Yeo on October 11, 2023, 01:39:33 am
It's clean in there. I cleaned it out 3 months ago. I did a full diagnostic from the built-in Dell diagnostics. All tests passed on thorough mode.. took a few hours.  The mechanical drive is new.

While in the BIOS, did you look at the page that shows CPU temperature and fan speed?
Mechanical drives fail really quick or after a long time, so you never know with a new drive until you've used it for a while, and SMART doesn't catch everything. The SSD is a good idea regardless whether your drive is failing or not.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on October 12, 2023, 04:01:57 am
...My ArcaOS 5.1 machine has started to get sluggish. Not sure what I can check. For example, opening Drives takes 10 seconds to show the drives, Firefox takes 30 seconds to open.. etc...

So how does that actually compare to the performance you saw BEFORE the issue started?

Are we talking a Day & Night kind of a difference, or is it that it "feels" like something's off?

Check Hobbes for a little util called 'cpuspeed', that'll show you the CPU core frequency in a CLI window, that way if the heat is an issue and your BIOS is throttling things back you should be able to tell.

In my case, I've got my Phenom II X6 set to 3850 MHz in BIOS and running at 3850 MHz while my OS/2 box is up and running.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on October 13, 2023, 05:31:43 am
It used to be snappier when opening folders.. Firefox has always been slow to load. Native apps load a lot quicker like Lotus SmartSuite and Describe, HyperAccess etc.

Question for you all.. I was reading that it might be better to have a 2 GB HPFS primary partition for the OS, and another JFS partition for Apps and another JFS partition for data. Any truth to this? If I'm going to re-do it, I want to do it right, rather than the easy one big JFS partition for the install.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Neil Waldhauer on October 13, 2023, 05:39:14 am
I happen to have two ArcaOS 5.1 partitions booting under UEFI on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M900. One has a 2 GB HPFS ArcaOS boot drive and a 10 GB JFS Programs, Home and Unixroot drive.

The HPFS drive boots in 24.4 seconds, while the JFS drive boots in 25.2 seconds. You will need a stopwatch to see the difference.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Dave Yeo on October 13, 2023, 05:48:26 am
While I never timed it, it seemed to me that having an HPFS boot partition was slower, and of course, if chkdsk runs, it is much slower.
Splitting up the stuff into multiple partitions is a good idea.
For Firefox, did you run ffturbo_install? If not, might help with loading speed and it will mark the DLLs to use high memory.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Andi B. on October 13, 2023, 12:27:43 pm
I gave up using HPFS(386) years ago. Reasons -
- long chkdsk times
- no >2GB files possible
- shared memory used by HPFS(386) can be used for better purposes

I see no advantage in using HPFS(386) anymore.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Neil Waldhauer on October 13, 2023, 03:19:28 pm
I found this page that discusses HPFS, JFS and ArcaOS disk layout.

https://88watts.net/disklayout.html (https://88watts.net/disklayout.html)
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on October 13, 2023, 06:11:45 pm
Yeah that's the article I found. I'm going to get a 500GB SSD and slice it up into three partitions.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Doug Clark on October 14, 2023, 07:31:00 am
Chris,

I am not sure of your situation.  It is a upgrade of an existing system to AOS  ver 5.1 and has become slow after the upgrade to v 5.1?  Or have you been running AOS 5.1 for awhile and it has become slower and slower?

As for filesystems, drives, and speed: my experience is JFS is much faster in chkdsk than HPFS.  SSDs are MUCH faster than spinning  drives on chkdsk and any kind of directory access - like opening a folder - even if both the spinning drive and SSD have the same sustained transfer rate.  Spinning drives also have the obvious problem of fragmentation over time.

If you have upgraded AOS and are accessing network drives, and the slow down occurred after the upgrade, could the NIC driver have changed?  I have had speed issues using the  multimac driver for the network adapter built into my motherboard, which I solved by installing a Intel pro 1000 NIC and using the Intel driver.  Don't know if it was multimac, my particular network adapter/motherboard combo or something else in my system.  But opening a file dialog box (FOC) was painful because of the slow access to networked drives.

My recommendation: boot drive/partition on an SSD,  swap file and firefox profile and TEMP directory on a spinning drive because of SSD wear and potential slow down.  Or if you have enough RAM, use a RAM disk for the TEMP directory.   If you are using the AOS RAM disk, format the RAM drive HPFS (unless that has been fixed.)
Use/add an SSD even if you are running SATA 2 or slower bus on your motherboard.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Remy on October 14, 2023, 11:26:14 am
Hey all,

My ArcaOS 5.1 machine has started to get sluggish. Not sure what I can check. For example, opening Drives takes 10 seconds to show the drives, Firefox takes 30 seconds to open.. etc.

Machine is a Dell Precision T3610:

4 Core XEON E5-1603 @ 2.80 Ghz
4 GB RAM
500GB 7200 RPM Mechanical Drive in AHCI mode

I turned off all Virtualization in BIOS.

I don't know what to look for, or where to start. Any help is appreciated.

I have similar long time but it only occurs when I have Big NTFS or not known OS/2 ormaUSB key plugged. (not recognized disk format unde ArcaOS has not have the same result and can be ignored at boot time) 
Once I remove the USB key, system goes faster. as well, after openeing dirves one time, next time are faster but not as fast as without the USB key (or USB disk)

Q: Do you have efat, ntfs or unrecognized USB key ledt plugged in at boot time ? 
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on October 17, 2023, 02:48:59 am
I think I had the ArcaOS USB installer in and my Describe CDROM..

I also got a 500GB Samsung SSD to install UEFI ArcaOS onto.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Pete on October 17, 2023, 03:46:04 pm
Hi

Just wondering if this is multimedia related...

CWMM (multimedia) checks drives and ID tags which may be causing a slowdown.
The good news is that you can turn those checks off in OS2.INI using an INI file editor eg Ini Editor from the INITOOLS package http://web.archive.org/web/20120513231650/http://www.os2world.com/goran/zip/initool110lng.zip

You need to add the following Keys to the CWMM Application

Keys                                                                  Values
mmClsDontCheckDrives                               ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

mmClsDontReadID3On Drives                   ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ


If you want a drive to be checked simply remove it from the above Values .


Regards

Pete


Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Martin Iturbide on October 17, 2023, 07:14:20 pm
Hi Pete
CWMM (multimedia) checks drives and ID tags which may be causing a slowdown.
....

I'm just curious, what are the utility/function of checking the drive ID Tags that CWMM does? I'm just asking since I don't know much about all the stuff that CWMM has.

Regards

Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Pete on October 17, 2023, 08:23:35 pm
Hi Martin

Something to do with mp3 files I think... don't know as I listen to music not mp3s  :-)

The CWMM Help is installed in \MMOS2\MMCLASS\cwmm.hlp


Regards

Pete
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on October 17, 2023, 11:54:06 pm
Ran into an issue. I Zero'd out the 500GB SSD and ArcaOS installer said it needed to 'fix' the drive and I chose GPT for the partition table and rebooted. Now ArcaOS installer says: "This GPT emulated disk is read-only for the following reason: Broken header 2."

Should I re-zero and try MBR?

Edit: Yeah, I should have used MBR :)
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on October 18, 2023, 07:09:30 pm
I tried UEFI 5.1 installation on the SSD but it wouldn't boot after Phase 1 from the SSD. I went with the CSM installation like I had on my mechanical drive.

Now I booted off the SSD and an doing an XCOPY C: D: /H/O/T/S/E/R/V to move my files over to the SSD. I ditched the multiple partitions for now.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on October 18, 2023, 11:48:32 pm
Xcopy from C: to D: did not work. System will not boot from the SSD after that. Anything else I can try? I am reinstalling 5.1 now to the SSD. My mechanical drive is on 5.1 as well.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Roderick Klein on October 19, 2023, 01:53:38 am
Ran into an issue. I Zero'd out the 500GB SSD and ArcaOS installer said it needed to 'fix' the drive and I chose GPT for the partition table and rebooted. Now ArcaOS installer says: "This GPT emulated disk is read-only for the following reason: Broken header 2."

Should I re-zero and try MBR?

Edit: Yeah, I should have used MBR :)

Avoid MBR, use GPT if you are going to install in UEFI mode.
I guess you only zero's the beginning of the disc.
GPT disc has a copy of the partition table at the end of the disc as well...
Run booted from ArcaOS install media the program initdisk.exe that dan be started from an OS/2
command line.

Roderick
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Pete on October 19, 2023, 05:36:20 am
Hi

Xcopy from C: to D: did not work. System will not boot from the SSD after that. Anything else I can try? I am reinstalling 5.1 now to the SSD. My mechanical drive is on 5.1 as well.

You may need to run
    \OS2\INSTALL\BOOTDISK\SYSINSTX.COM D:
presuming D: is the SSD


Regards

Pete
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on October 19, 2023, 05:22:45 pm
I tried Roderick and Pete's suggestions. SYSINSTX was able to copy the files but still didn't boot. Initdisk gave me the "broken header 2" error that I got from my first attempt (I selected GPT)
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Rich Walsh 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.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on October 19, 2023, 11:55:03 pm
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. I can try that util Rich if you want to share it.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on October 20, 2023, 12:05:37 am
I found a used SSD 128GB Samsung Pro that I am wiping now with the same method to try out.. much smaller should wipe quicker
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Rich Walsh 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.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Remy on October 20, 2023, 09:51:21 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.

In the past, I used testdisk after losing a GPT disk which was altered by ArcaOS adding MBR on it during installation.
With tesdisk, I could put GPT back very quickly (may be - not tried out of windows disk and only a supposition - it could help for mbr/gpt change but other function may not be usable due jfs nor hpfs aren't told been supported)

I suggest you to use zip instead of diskcopy (I use zip now " from the root partition to save: zip -r -S -9 -y n:\drive_src.zip * (n=destination drive letter) " since arca noae support team suggested me to use zip. It could be very long but it has several  advantages. 1/ you have a backup - 2/unzip into the new partition and if needed run instalx to have it bootable

If these information could help ! 
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on October 21, 2023, 03:40:31 am
Ok, second SSD 128GB.. wiped it and got the same partition error. Going on vacation for a few days, will try again when I get back.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on October 30, 2023, 07:00:26 pm
Ok, I got Rich's program and was able to create a GPT drive, installed ArcaOS and when I rebooted to finish the installation I am stuck on the ArcaOS logo screen.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Rich Walsh 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.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Roderick Klein on October 30, 2023, 10:42:26 pm
Ok, I got Rich's program and was able to create a GPT drive, installed ArcaOS and when I rebooted to finish the installation I am stuck on the ArcaOS logo screen.

Ok, I got Rich's program and was able to create a GPT drive, installed ArcaOS and when I rebooted to finish the installation I am stuck on the ArcaOS logo screen.

Interesting I have heard of more people having such an issue. The primary suspect with these random hangs is the ACPI.PSD that is running into some sort of trouble. I seen this before but I think it was tracked down what the cause was. Dutch OS/2 user Keith Merrington has such a system and have one as well. I have some questions I want you to answer:

Are you running UEFI boot on this system.  That makes debugging this hang more difficult because of some limitations.
The problem is that you can not disable the ACPI.PSD in the config.sys as ArcaOS does will not boot on the next boot.

You can try this:
https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/bootdiag/

However what is more interesting is to see if we can get a serial log of the ACPI.SD.

Question does your mainboard have a serial port ?

Doug your system has a serial port ?

If so: https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/acpi/requirements/
See the section "Collecting logs"

You need another PC with a serial port to collect the data and a terminal program.

If have more questions, let me know.

Roderick
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Pete on October 31, 2023, 01:52:46 am
Hi christech

You could try to see where the boot is failing by pressing ALT-F1 when boot starts - when you see OS/2 in the top left corner of screen.

That will bring up a "pre-boot menu" which has an option to display drivers loading. Select that then 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


Regards

Pete
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Doug Clark on October 31, 2023, 05:28:57 am
Roderick,

I have a serial port on the motherboard  - but I am running AOS 5.0x, i.e. MBR and legacy BIOS so I don't know if I can be any help.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Rich Walsh 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.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Pete on October 31, 2023, 06:35:41 am
Hi Rich

The GPT.FLT "slowdown" doubles boot time here from around 15 secs to just over 30 secs - very noticeable when you have got used to the 15 sec boot.

You, and Roderick, are very probably right to suspect the ACPI.PSD - but it does not hurt to check where boot stops just in case it is a different problem.


Regards

Pete
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on October 31, 2023, 05:17:29 pm
Well just for the shiggles I wiped the hard drive again and just did MBR instead of GPT. Created the EFI partition and another partition for ArcaOS. Everything worked. Booted up with no issues. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Rich Walsh on October 31, 2023, 09:43:30 pm
The GPT.FLT "slowdown" doubles boot time here from around 15 secs to just over 30 secs - very noticeable when you have got used to the 15 sec boot.

That seems border-line pathological. I disabled my AHCI driver so only the NVME drive would be visible. GPT.FLT took less than a second to complete its work. I reenabled AHCI so my Western Digital 500gb SSD was visible and GPT now took 7 seconds. Could that drive be configured in BIOS as "legacy" rather than AHCI? If not, then its performance certainly seems ..umm.. sub-optimal. If you don't use the drive when running OS/2, you may want to workaround this by telling AHCI to ignore that adapter (you'll still need AHCI if you have a DVD drive).
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Rich Walsh on October 31, 2023, 10:46:27 pm
Well just for the shiggles I wiped the hard drive again and just did MBR instead of GPT. Created the EFI partition and another partition for ArcaOS. Everything worked. Booted up with no issues. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

MBR is a viable option if you plan to use the machine solely for OS/2. If you plan to install other OSes, it's a luser:

* Linux may install with some coaxing but Win certainly won't

* your SSD/NVME will run slightly slower and wear out somewhat faster because MBR partitions aren't MB-aligned the way GPT partitions are

* using MBR effectively disables the firmware boot manager on the machines I've tested. Rather than booting the first entry on the its boot-order list, it will *always* load BOOTX64.EFI. That's how some users were able to switch to reFind simply by replacing BOOTX64: they're using an MBR disk - on a GPT disk the machine would likely still load LAUNCHER.EFI per the boot-order list.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on November 01, 2023, 06:18:27 pm
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.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Rich Walsh on November 01, 2023, 07:29:32 pm
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.

The OS/2 AHCI and NVME drivers hide disks they don't recognize to prevent OS/2 LVM from destroying exotic disk formats (e.g. LUKS). You can override this behavior by adding "/!U" to the BASEDEV=OS2AHCI.ADD line in 'config.sys'. For BASEDEV=NVME.ADD, add "/U" (yes, it's the opposite of AHCI). For more details (on an installed system) look in \SYS\DOCS\AHCI and \SYS\DOCS\NVME.

Another pitfall: once a disk has been layed-out using GPT, you can't repartition it unless you disable GPT.FLT in 'config.sys'. If the util I sent you can't partition your new disk, use another OS but don't create any partitions for OS/2. Use MiniLVM to do that so they are designated as "OS/2 Type 1" partitions. (MiniLVM knows how to create Linux and Win partitions, but gparted and Disk Manager don't know how to create OS/2 partitions.)
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on November 01, 2023, 08:43:40 pm
Thanks Rich. I appreciate all of the information.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Roderick Klein on November 01, 2023, 10:59:00 pm
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

Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Pete on November 02, 2023, 02:43:34 am
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




Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: christech on November 03, 2023, 05:52:30 pm
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?  ;D Any other OS that gave me this much trouble I would have just given up!
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Roderick Klein on November 03, 2023, 08:00:24 pm
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?  ;D 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

Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Andrew Stephenson on November 03, 2023, 10:20:56 pm
Aren't computers fun?  ;D 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?
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Roderick Klein on November 04, 2023, 08:34:00 pm
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?  ;D 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
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Martin Iturbide on November 05, 2023, 02:39:49 am
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 (https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/poweredge-hardware-general/enabling-memory-mapped-io-4gb-has-issues-on-r720/647f44b0f4ccf8a8deca9906). They suggest updating the BIOS, did you check if your T3610 is using the latest BIOS (https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/product-support/product/precision-t3610-workstation/drivers) just in case?

Regards
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Lars on November 05, 2023, 08:20:14 am
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.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Dave Yeo on November 05, 2023, 05:01:10 pm
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.
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Roderick Klein on November 06, 2023, 04:55:08 pm
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
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Roderick Klein on November 06, 2023, 04:57:40 pm
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 (https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/poweredge-hardware-general/enabling-memory-mapped-io-4gb-has-issues-on-r720/647f44b0f4ccf8a8deca9906). They suggest updating the BIOS, did you check if your T3610 is using the latest BIOS (https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/product-support/product/precision-t3610-workstation/drivers) 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
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on November 11, 2023, 10:21:24 pm
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?
Title: Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
Post by: Pete on November 12, 2023, 02:43:03 am
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