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Messages - Roderick Klein

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1
What might be a better option would be a kind of XP Mode, like in Windows 7. A lean and fast virtual environment for running a modern browser. And as if that weren't dreamy enough, perhaps even seamless on the WPS.

It can work, however the big issue is that if you look how much memory the VM needs, plus the memory to run the OS + the browser. With the limited memory ArcaOS has it will pretty quickly run out of gas.

All discussions about PAE memory is sadly a big fat none starter. Idea's to make any program on OS/2 use PAE memory is a pipe dream. Now the current ArcaOS loader enables you to put a ramdrive in PAE memory. However the amount of addressable memory is not increased. The PAE code is extremely cool bit of codingin the ArcaOS loader. However it has a hidden cost in terms of performance. When you want to access memory above the 4 GB address range (for the ram drive) the loader effectively holds the CPU, switched CPU to PAE mode safe stack again and switch back. I am not describing it technically 100% accurate but PAE support via the UEFI loader has performance cost. There is BTW no other way to implement this.

Patch the OS/2 kernel to support PAE would possibly take about 6 to 12 months of full time. It would be a gigantic job. But then the drivers  need to be updated for this.
I looked at this with Steve Levine years ago and its to much work that it will mostl likely never work.

One of the things that needs to be looked at is if the memory consumption of the QT webkit engine can be reduced. But this is currently under research. I will have more news on QT development. Tune into Warpstock Europe video stream, details on wwww.warpstock.eu.

Roderick

2
Programming / Re: A nice paper on DD Development on OS/2
« on: April 18, 2025, 03:24:04 pm »
I wonder if David his 32 bit driver development toolkit is of more use as it takes some stuff away from the developer such and pointer thunking.

Roderick

3
How can I get this software ?

Roderick

4
Hi Jailbird

Thank you for the reply. I was aware of the setting in the Info.plist that would make the app launch in non-retina mode. This then allows you to run the VM with 100% scaling. It's way too small normally to use 100% and you have to use 200% to give you the correct size when using a Retina display.

However if you make the suggested change and try to launch the Virtual Box VM under macOS Sonoma it refuses to start and complains about the app signature being broken. This doesn't happen with Monterey, so I thought I was stuck using the 200% setting with Sonoma.

BUT, I've just discovered that you can launch the app and pass an 'AppleMagnifiedMode' argument to open it in non-retina mode. This does work so I can launch a specific VirtualBox VM from the command line using:

   open /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/Resources/VirtualBoxVM.app --args -AppleMagnifiedMode YES -comment ArcaOS-Exp --startvm 2f3f6889-be25-42ba-a78a-83a4c6be3139 --no-startvm-errormsgbox

This does indeed seem to be little bit faster. Not hugely, but everything helps.

So, after playing with lots of settings, the configuration I'm now using is:

   1920x1080 resolution, 65536 colours, 100% scaling, non-retina app mode

It is still too slow for comfort so I will continue to investigate and I might raise a ticket with the VirtualBox developers, but it is a bit more useable than it was.

Many thanks
David

Also run in single CPU mode, do not configure on Mac more then 1 CPU.

Roderick

5
General Discussion / Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« on: April 01, 2025, 09:56:05 am »
Dear all,
How about an OS/2 or ARCOS without Windows and DOS? Wouldn't that be easier?

Thanks everyone

Its about 25% of the kernel source is the VDM support. But removing that is not going to make it easier I am afraid to get a new kernel.

Roderick

6
General Discussion / Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« on: April 01, 2025, 09:55:07 am »
Hello

For the moment we have in no specific order:
1) Modern web browser
2) Wifi Driver.
3) Memory issues
4) IPv6.

And side discussion:
1) There is no need to worry because we have virtualization.
2) The dislike of RPM/YUM or FHS.

Regards

It would be great if Arca Noae can officialy support QEMU as of version 2.92 or 2.94 QEMU now works with ArcaOS. But we would need mouse and clipboard integration.
I think VMworkstation is less attractive with the unknown commercial goals of Broadcom (read VMware). Sorry there ESXi server prices are a pure rip off. Some company customers I know that have seen in 1 year time
the cost of ESXi go up by a factor of 10. I wonder how price competitive VMware (Broadcom products will remain).

Roderick

7
General Discussion / Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« on: April 01, 2025, 09:52:42 am »
Another up coming problem is IPv6, which luckily for us is taking forever to catch on. Eventually we would need a new network stack.

Its going to be interesting I would need to have more indications about this. What I see happening i that some modems from ISP have IPv4 emulation and tunnel over IPv6 if I get it correctly.
The company I work still has with 800 people IPv4 internally on the company LAN. I agree a multi protocol stack (Ipv4 and IPv6) might be nice to have but we simply lack the human resources.
From what I understand the old socketsk.sys is 98% recompiled FreeBSD code and 2 is OS/2 specific code. The point being we might be able to port a new stack from FreeBSD.
But this will not be done in month and will require a full time developer.

Roderick

8
General Discussion / Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« on: April 01, 2025, 09:49:53 am »

I still think that we are falling behind in applications. A modern web browser will help on that, since there are a lot of applications that are on the web without the need to install those, and on the other side compiling and porting applications are now starting to get complicated because of the 32bits/Memory limitation.

A Modern Browser and solving the memory limitations are getting more important for new apps.

Regards

The memory limitation can be solved with magic wand with the current kernel. We might want to wish for this but its not going to happen.
Talk to Steve Levine who helps BWW out with debugging GCC programs. He also helps Paul Smedley to debug programs. But you need to use possibly memory dumps, Thesues and othee tootls to find out WHY a program runs out of memory.
From what I understand from Steve is that for example in the current PHP there is code added to prevent PHP for allocation more memory (Steve if you are reading can you comment please).  While not all limitations of 64 bit apps can be resolved some of them can be resolved by digging in the code for example and add checks to prevent it from consuming to much memory.  But this is of course time consuming process.

Roderick

9
General Discussion / Re: Brainstorm: What is Next with OS/2 ?
« on: April 01, 2025, 08:12:08 am »
memory issues:
as I understand, libc uses shared memory.
there were attempts to make it use HighMem.
There were discussions, there were announcements.
there were attempts to patch exe files to use HighMem.

But current situation: you can start Firefox and OpenOffice only 1 time.
if you load this heavy apps then memory is occupied and you should reboot system to use firefox again.
Java VM (I don't remember, does it depend on libc), is consuming low memory too.

Question: what is the current state of libc ? it was modified?

P.S. It's not a claim. I make  technical request.

I think its kernel 14.203 from Arca Noae that resolves this issue. High memory with older kernel (if DLL's are loaded high into memory) and then unloaded the memory is not released.
Using the latest ArcaOS kernel this should work.

Roderick

10
Comments, Suggestions & Questions / Re: ArcaOS TestLog
« on: February 28, 2025, 12:26:02 pm »
I understand something like is being worked on.

Roderick

11
Virtualization / Re: Win-OS/2 - Open vbesvga.drv video driver
« on: February 08, 2025, 09:47:27 pm »
Hello

Currently my Win-OS2 full screen session (1920x1080) has a "slow-choppy" mouse and you can not move the mouse pointer down from the middle of the screen. (ArcaOS 5.1 BIOS running on a VirtualBox host. )

On the "OS/2, EComStation & ArcaOS Discussion group" facebook page, it was posted something about this new video driver for Windows 3.1:
- https://github.com/PluMGMK/vbesvga.drv?tab=readme-ov-file

It has some instructions on how to install it, but if I follow the procedure and it gives me an error when I load Windows 3.1.
Quote
Unsuitable settings for current driver / hardware
Press any key to about booting Windows...

If I only remove from the modified system.ini all the [VBESVGA.DRV] part...
Quote
[VBESVGA.DRV]
PMIDcheck=sanity
Width=1920
Height=1080
Depth=16
DoubleBufRefreshRate=75
...Win-OS2 full screen runs with the newer vbesvga.drv and vddvbe.386. But the screen resolution is smaller (1024 × 768), mouse now works fine and I can go to the bottom part of the screen with the pointer.

Do you think this drivers can be useful for our Win-OS2? Can we benefit in some way from this driver? Any other suggestion on how to make this drivers work at 1920x1080?

Regards

I am not certain but I think what is being overlooked is that the WIN/OS2 driver uses I think a special GRADD driver that deals with the WIN/OS2 screen resolution. I think this bypasses the normal DOS video support. This alternative Windows 3.1 video driver looks nice. However you might be out of luck with this driver as I think (based on the file name) this is a VESA driver. And this alternative Windows 3.1 driver then depends on the VESA bios in the DOS session.

But I could be wrng.

Roderick

12
Virtualization / Re: DOS VDM does not loads
« on: February 05, 2025, 07:17:41 pm »
Or did you upgrade the Virtualbox version recently and that broken it ?

Roderick

13
Applications / Re: ARCAOS 5.1 install
« on: February 05, 2025, 06:45:27 pm »
I have a problem, finishing instalation of AOS5.1 in UEFI-mode. After several reboots, installation went find until suddeny another reboot was required, but the reboot-button had no effect - and autreboot also didn't work.
I rebooted the "normal way", but the problem remained the same. tried several times
Startup.cmd leaves me with "install.exe allcopy2-pg /LogsC:\var\log /Fonts=M".
Even after trying an update-installation i come to the same result...

I get the message: CALL NOCDBOOT.cmd R:   Sys1041: The name NOCDBoot.cmd is not recognized as an internal or external command, ioerable program or batch file. 6 *-* 'CALL NOCDBOOT.CMD R:'; +++ RC(1041)
then: the before mentioned startup-cmd appears.
then: just [C:sys\install\gui]

How can I finish the installation process?

Basedon this error message this has nothing todo with the selection of the PEER installer.  The best I can read that error messages is that the second phase (booting from the hard drive the first time) de-rails when it tries to load the installer UI that shows the progress bar. The IBM PEER installer has then not even been loaded at that , that is done  by the CID backend way later in the installer process.

Best regards,

Roderick Klein

14
Configure the VM to run with 1 CPU core, if it does not run with one CPU core already.

Sorry, but this is bad advice. Modern virtualbox allows ArcaOS to run just fine in SMP mode with multiple cores.

On Linux that is true it seems. But this is a MacOS system. From what I understand Virtualbox has to use virtualsation layer offered by MacOS. And this layer with multiple CPU enabled kills system performance.

Roderick

15
Configure the VM to run with 1 CPU core, if it does not run with one CPU core already.

Roderick Klein

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