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Messages - Paul Smedley

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91
Hardware / Re: Benchmarks on real vs virtualised hardware
« on: 2011.04.13, 03:04:37 »
Hiya Dave,

  Those results are fantastic! I have often wondered if it would be possible to set up an absolutely minimalist Linux (I haven't found a distribution I really liked) that all it does is run VirtualBox and somehow you could have it boot to a VirtualBox menu where you then choose your OS... sort of like a Boot Manager or AirBoot ... and then run whatever OS's you like virtually. A 'VirtualOS' or BootOS' so to speak. Your results show it could be a viable solution.

  As you know, I too got a new motherboard and processor and am less than thrilled with how eCS runs on it, although it seems certain the issues will be taken care of eventually. I think I will spend some time looking at Linux again...

  Hope everything works out with your knee.

Yeah I must say I was surprised - I was expecting to find a penalty in terms of compiler speed running under a virtual machine - I did the tests to determine how big the penalty would be, and could I live with it.

I was absolutely staggered to find that the virtual machine gives the best results.

I have a 2nd hard drive with eCS installed in the new machine, so I'll continue to test things out as they develop - ie fixed gradd.sys for mtrr settings, updated danis506.add, etc

However for me, my desktop usage at home is pretty much email and web and compiling code.

Email and web I can do from any OS, compiling code I need eCS - as I don't actually create code, I'm not a good enough programmer for that, I just port stuff to eCS - something that gives me a lot of satisfaction, and something I do as a 'release' from my day job.

Knees are coming along well - a 'clean out' of some arthritis from behind both knee caps.  Should be back at work next week.

Cheers,

Paul

92
Hardware / Benchmarks on real vs virtualised hardware
« on: 2011.04.13, 00:30:24 »
A couple of weeks ago, I bought a new Intel Core i7-2600 processor, and a Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD3R-B3 motherboard, and 4gb of DDR3 ram to go with it, hoping to use it to continue to run eComStation 2.0.

Whilst the system does run eCS, and all 4 cores are recognised by acpi.psd, some other aspects leave a lot to be desired:
- SATA controller is recognised only in generic mode
- Panorama is unable to set MTRRs, so video speed sucks.

The above led me to explore running Ubuntu - something I've dabbled with in the past on my Thinkpad.  Over the last week since I had knee surgery, I've dabbled with Ubuntu some more on the Thinkpad due to intermittent wireless problems with eCS on the Thinkpad, and have grown to like it as a desktop OS - especially once I found I could run PMView for Windows using WINE directly from the desktop.

I've now installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my new hardware, and yesterday installed eCS under Virtualbox 4.0.4 as an experiment to see how quickly things compiled.

The results are as follows (not sure how cleanly this will display) (All times in minutes)

App                Intel Q9400 Native    Intel i7-2600 Native         Intel i7-2600 Virtual**

Bind 9.8.0               3:17                            4:04                                  1:47
Quassel 0.7.2        15:51                          15:00                                  8:45
Ghostscript 9.02      5:42                            5:18                                  2:43
MySQL 5.1.56        28:55                          22:22                                12:16

**Intel i7-2600 Virtual represents eCS 2.0 running under Virtualbox 4.0.4 under a 64-bit build of Ubuntu 10.10

As can be seem, the Intel i7-2600 Virtualised is nearly twice as fast as either of the native systems.

I'm continuing to work to get the SATA controller and system MTRR problems addressed for the i7-2600 using eCS - but at this stage it's looking like I'll be switching to Ubuntu for my main desktop OS real soon now.

Note that I do intend to continue to support my ports of OS/2 and eCS software at http://os2ports.smedley.info - porting software is something that I continue to enjoy to do!

93
I am trying to make a image of a os/2 installed 40 gb hard disk.There is only 740 mb data on the disk and I want to convert it on to my flash card so I want to make image for that ,But when I try to make image by Acronics or Norton ghost they copy whole partition which is of 37 gb.
Is there any utility by which I can make image of oly data area.

I'm pretty sure dfsee has an option to compress the data so will do this....

94
USB / Re: USB to Parallel Bridge
« on: 2011.04.12, 02:17:48 »
Ivan,

Snap won't work with my i7-2600 - so using Panorama + widescreen activator.

Cheers,

Paul

95
USB / Re: USB to Parallel Bridge
« on: 2011.04.12, 00:13:04 »
Hi All,
Hi Daniel
Hello guys...
I am buying a new machine (brand new i7 2600 processor, 8GB of RAM, intel H67 based motherboard) and I hope to run eComStation 2 in this machine. It will be here by april 20, so I am only guessing if it will work.

I just bought the same processor, but I chose an Intel P67 based motherboard.  I have eCS 2 running, but currently not in a satisfactory manner.

Onboard LAN (Realtek R8111c) is not (yet) supported by the new eCS Realtek driver - although it is supported in the latest linux source, so it should be trivial to add support.

Sound is recognised by Uniaud 2.1.x but not Uniaud 1.9.x (due to higher ALSA version in 2.1.x)

SATA controller only works in generic mode until Danis506 is updated.

Widescreen activator doesn't recognise the CPU bridge but I'm in conversation with Robert Lalla on that issue and hope to have that resolved soon.

High IRQ loads are common - I believe this is due to system MTRR not being set correctly.  Unfortunately whilst Lars Erdmann has a utility to set MTRR's - it's currently failing here with:
GRADD.SYS returns error 65330 in IOCTL call GRADDPDD_QUERYMTRR.Cannot query MTRRs.

and Lars is very busy right now.

Once all the above is resolved it should be a nice system :)

Just to update things... no real progress...

I have an updated atombios.sys - and can add 1920x1080 to the list of supported resolutions, however it doesn't work correctly.

A little hard to describe, but when booted to 1920x1080 - there is a strip of the desktop missing down both the LH and RH sides of the screen - enough so that the icons on the desktop on the LH are completely missing, as is the eCS button on the toolbar at the bottom of the screen.

Steven Levine sent me an updated danis506 with the Cougar Point SATA controller ID added, but it isn't being recognised yet.

System MTRR are still unable to be set.

Meanwhile, Ubuntu 10.10 works fantastically on the hardware, and eCS in Virtualbox flies :)

Cheers,

Paul

96
Hi Daniel,

Mensys has announced their interest on claiming this bounty.
The binaries are available for download at: http://svn.ecomstation.nl/multimac
The source code is also posted on that site.
Mensys had requested that the founds claimed will be donated back to the "Eclipse.org Standard Windowing Toolkit (SWT) OS/2 Port" bounty.
Any feedback from the community is welcome in this thread. I will be closing the bounty and moving the funds in two weeks.

  I believe they are doing a pretty good job on updating NIC drivers.

  BTW... any chance of Intel 82579 being supported by e1000 on eCS? It seems it'll be present on my new motherboard and Linux e1000 seems to support it already, but it is not listed on eCS's e1000 wiki. :/

The e1000 driver for eCS is pretty easy to build - I'd imagine it would be fairly easy to merge in support for newer chipsets from the Linux module.  When you get your board, if it doesn't work, I'll try take a look for you if nobody else steps up.

97
USB / Re: USB to Parallel Bridge
« on: 2011.04.02, 10:54:31 »
Hi Daniel
Hello guys...
I am buying a new machine (brand new i7 2600 processor, 8GB of RAM, intel H67 based motherboard) and I hope to run eComStation 2 in this machine. It will be here by april 20, so I am only guessing if it will work.

I just bought the same processor, but I chose an Intel P67 based motherboard.  I have eCS 2 running, but currently not in a satisfactory manner.

Onboard LAN (Realtek R8111c) is not (yet) supported by the new eCS Realtek driver - although it is supported in the latest linux source, so it should be trivial to add support.

Sound is recognised by Uniaud 2.1.x but not Uniaud 1.9.x (due to higher ALSA version in 2.1.x)

SATA controller only works in generic mode until Danis506 is updated.

Widescreen activator doesn't recognise the CPU bridge but I'm in conversation with Robert Lalla on that issue and hope to have that resolved soon.

High IRQ loads are common - I believe this is due to system MTRR not being set correctly.  Unfortunately whilst Lars Erdmann has a utility to set MTRR's - it's currently failing here with:
GRADD.SYS returns error 65330 in IOCTL call GRADDPDD_QUERYMTRR.Cannot query MTRRs.

and Lars is very busy right now.

Once all the above is resolved it should be a nice system :)

Cheers,

Paul

98
Found a way to put the SATA controllers into legacy mode and now the system boots up to the Snap copyright text, then hangs when starting pmshell.exe

At least I'm making some progress :)

99
Hi All,

Started to set this up this afternoon. 

Did a bench test first before I extracted the existing motherboard out of the case.

Unfortunately, I can't get eCS booting as yet.

When I try and boot off my 1TB hard drive, I'm getting the following:
'OS/2 is unable to operate your hard disk or diskette drive.  The system is stopped. Correct the preceding error and restart the system'

When I try and boot off the eCS CD, it comes up with the pre-boot menu and I can change options, but after booting, I'm getting:
'Insert eComStation Installation CD-ROM and press any key.'

I tried playing around with the danis506 settings in terms of forcegbm, etc but no effect.

Any suggestions?

Cheers,

Paul

100
Hi All,

Thanks for the information.

I ended up going with:
Gigabyte P67A-UD3R-B3 and Intel Core I7-2600

Will report back hopefully later this afternoon once I get around to installing it.

Cheers,

Paul

101
Thanks guys - I found a Gigabyte board with a traditional BIOS - GA-P67A-UD3RB3 - will most likely go for this one rather than take a chance on UEFI support..

102
Hi All,

Per the subject - I'm looking to upgrade my hardware to a new system running an Asus P8P67.

One thing that concerns me is that the Asus site brags about the use of an EFI bios.

IIRC - these boards won't work with OS/2?

Maybe I should go for a socket 1366 or 1156 board that still has a traditional BIOS?

Any tips appreciated.

Thanks,

Paul

103
Applications / Re: RPM/YUM !
« on: 2011.01.24, 04:07:57 »
btw look for unrpm.zip - not sure where I downloaded it from, but it can be used to extract an rpm to get the base files out - without installing rpm.

104
Article Discussions / Re: Java / OpenJDK 1.6.0-b19 Beta 2
« on: 2011.01.23, 06:08:25 »
For those users with SMP systems and seeing hangs in java.exe after program termination, does running 'execmode java.exe" and marking the executable as a single processor app help?

105
General Discussion / Re: What are Your real priorytes ?
« on: 2011.01.06, 06:54:49 »
Quote
Out of curiousity, what is it about CUPS that you feel isn't up to the job?

It seems that some new support program (for CUPS) is now required for some printers (something like HPLIP). It also seems that Paul has declined to port it (don't remember why). It also seems that some of the available PPD files just don't work properly. For instance, I have a Canon i960 printer. There is a PPD file for it, that prints the full page in the top, left quarter of the page. So far, I have not found a way to get that to do anything else. Trying some other possible PPD files results in various other problems, that don't seem to be fixable. I have not had much time to work with this, so there could be something that I have missed. Fortunately, the i960 works fine using the old i950 support in the OMNI driver. My brother also has a newer Canon MP325 (I think). It will also work with CUPS, but not properly. The vertical prints at twice the height that it should. Again, I did not have much time to work with that, so the printer is only usable in windows, at this time. I should get another shot at making that work, sometime over the spring/summer time period.

FWIW, CUPS is a huge step forward, but it is certainly not the real answer to printer support. Unfortunately, it seems that it will be the only printer support for new printers, so eCS users will have to carefully select their printers (which has been the case forever anyway). I suspect that CUPS will, slowly, run out of steam, in much the same way that GENMAC has declined to the point of not being usable with new hardware any more. The only thing going for CUPS, is that it is still under development in the Linux world. However, the latest version that was ported (from cups-1.4.4-os2-20100812.zip), seems to have a few problems (like it asks for a user ID, and password, but nobody has suggested what it is actually looking for, so logging into it is not possible). I am sure that these problems can be fixed, if somebody, who knows what they are doing, takes the time to figure them out. Meanwhile, there are at least two printers, that I know of, that just plain don't work properly with CUPS, and I, personally, have never seen one that does work with CUPS, even though both printers seem to be supported by CUPS in the UNIX world.

The bottom line is, that better printer support is something that should be addressed, but there are other things that are more important.

Actually HPLIP has been available for over 7 months from http://svn.netlabs.org/ecups/wiki/CupsPort

A link to cups 1.4.5 has also been posted to the ecups mailing list.  Not sure why you think that cups is going to run out of steam when Apple bought the company that wrote it and it is the printing system used by every Apple computer that is sold, as well as just about every unix distribution.

Maybe you're referring to the OS/2 port of cups running out of steam - I can't see that happening anytime soon, although every time I read about Apple's being on sale I am tempted to go buy a 27" iMac :)


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