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Ecomstation Compatability On New Hardware

Started by PAUL555, 2011.02.11, 06:38:47

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PAUL555

I was wondering why Serenity Systems doesnt take the strategy of supporting only a fixed set of modern hardware, say 5 differant Video Cards, 5 differant motherboards, 5 differant hard disks, 5 differant network cards e.t.c from major manufacturers which are widely available throughout the world. This would greatly increase the sales of Ecomstation as the installations issues would not come up. The following year they should support the next version of those same hardware. This strategy would ensure that Ecomstation would be compatible with a limited set of of modern hardware in the future. Anyone wanting to build a personal computer for Ecomstation would use only those set of hardware and hence Ecomstation would be guaranteed to install correctly out of the box without needing any tweaking e.t.c similar to Windows. This would also greatly reduce the development time and effort for Serenity Systems and possibly increase worlwide sales.

Paul  

EugeneGorbunoff

It's very easy:

The users *don't support* the eCS resellers and buy hardware from local computer shops. They select hardware by color, by price, ..

The only thing we can do: publish the listings of tested hardware: http://ecomstation.ru/hardware.php

Andi

Probably you will email this to Serenity Systems not here - whoever if any is behind there and will read it :-)

Pete

Hi Paul

I think that is a bad idea simply because whatever hardware eCS then supports will probably not be available from local computer shops - and I doubt Mensys will want to purchase and stock large quantities of the supported hardware.

That will make building systems for eCS far more difficult.

If people could be bothered posting results - good and bad - to a list such as http://en.ecomstation.ru/hardware.php then we would have a good starting point for what hardware works and what does not as well as any tips about getting the hardware working. Here is an example http://en.ecomstation.ru/hardware.php?action=item&id=1971 which should help anyone trying to install eCS2.0GA on an Acer Travelmate 5720

Regards

Pete

ivan

Restricting any OS to a few pieces of hardware can only be undertaken by the likes of Apple.  To do so for eCS and/or OS/2 would only hasten the end because hardware changer every year - what is available now most probably won't be in 9 months time.  We had to change motherboards for two systems we were building because the few weeks between writing the specification and ordering the parts the motherboard became unavailable.

In case anyone is interested we are using the following:
motherboard:  Asus  M4A78LT-M LE
processor:      AMD Athlon II x4 640
memory:        G.Skill 2 x 2 GB PC10600 NT
disks:              Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C S-ATA  500 GB / 16 MB
                       Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C S-ATA   1 TB /32 MB
optical:            Samsung OEM DVD writer
                       Samsung OEM DVD ROM
OS:                 WSeB

SMP works - all processors are seen.
Sound works with uniaud drivers - at least for what we want.
The only thing that doesn't work at the moment is the on board Atheros 8131 lan  - there is a ndis2 dir on the support CD but it isn't complete, the OS/2  driver is missing, they do have the nif.

The two systems are up working 24/7 for the last month and we haven't found any problems yet.


rwklein

At a glance the suggestion of Paul would make sense. But you know what most hardware is so identical these days which results in the following examples.

You only know this is you have been involved in device driver development/testing.

For example porting the ALSA driver to OS/2
with UNIAUD once you have one chipset working the rest comes as part of the package. Most of the problems UNIAUD had in the past on OS/2 where because of problems in the interface driver UNIAUD16.

The same goes for USB drivers, most of the drivers we have on OS/2 support basically all USB host controllers and base equipment because the interface to the hardware is pretty standard. Problem is that the old released drivers from IBM are currently needin an update. This is being  done by Lars Erdmann and his drivers are on hobbes.

The same goes for SATA support. Most chipsets have a pretty common interface. The same is true for the AHCI driver that is under development.

Take a look at multimac project (funded by Mensys) http://svn.ecomstation.nl/multimac Browse the source code.
Its split up in Realtek, Intel and Nvidia sources. Once one chipset works a whole truckload of chipsets works.

One last other problem is that the hardware its alive on the market is shorter and shorter. And not all equipment is just as good available in the world. We have had this with one large company customer that needed a *recent* hp workstation 1 year later we had to certify a new workstation for this customer because it was no longer for sale! So go figure!

The basic ball game is that when one chipset for modern hardware is supported and your code skeleton is oke you get a basicly all hardware supported without any trouble. Multimac, Uniaud and updated USB drivers and the Daniela driver are to a large degree proof of this.

The only hardware that is kind of tricky are video chipsets. Thats why eCS uses Panorama, this driver uses the VESA interface. Which won't go away that quickly from video cards BIOS'es.

Roderick Klein
Mensys

PAUL555


If Mac could make this happen, then there is no reason why other companies cannot make this happen. I understand that the end users(hobbyists) are not the core customers of Ecomstation. The core customers are obviously the government / large banks / large companies. I am assuming that Ecomstation right from version 1.0 is supporting the hardware used by those core customers.

My suggestion is only to avoid the long development time and effort (similar to what happened for Ecomstation 1.2 to 2.0 - around 6 years). The alternate suggestion is to have two versions of the OS, one for the core customers and one for the end user / hobbyist(which can increase worldwide sales). The only stumbling block in my opinion in more wider usage of Ecomstation is that it doesnt install and work out of the box on all hardware. Earlier the price was an issue, now that has been taken care of by Mensys since 2.0 came out. Every single review I have read on the Intenet of Ecomstation right from 1.0 to 2.0 has been of the installation failing or some hardware not working properly. This fact alone greatly discourages any new users from trying out Ecomstation on real hardware other than on virtual machine emulators. Other than Microsoft, in my opinion, I dont believe any company has the resources or the investment to support every single type of hardware out in the world. 


Paul


rudi

Quote from: PAUL555 on 2011.02.12, 04:23:39
If Mac could make this happen, then there is no reason why other companies cannot make this happen.

Sure they can. If they design and manufacture the hardware exclusively: no problem.

BTW: a little story: I once wrote a driver for a device that used to work nicely for quite some time. I added it to the list of supported hardware. Fine. Recently I got a report from a user who purchased this device and it would not work at all. What happened ? Well, the manufacturer had decided to switch chipsets. He did not change the package. He did not change the enclosure. He did not even change the website (oh wait, that's not fully correct: now two (Windows-) drivers are offered for download in the support section). So even though there still are plenty of old-style devices in the distribution channels, I had to remove this device from the "supported hardware" list. But I'm 100% sure that there will be people purchasing the new chipset device and being disappointed because it won't work...


Quote from: PAUL555 on 2011.02.12, 04:23:39
Other than Microsoft, in my opinion, I dont believe any company has the resources or the investment to support every single type of hardware out in the world.

Microsoft doesn't do that. They develop a relatively solid core that covers devices that comply to common standards and leave the rest to the manufacturers.

Many of the problems we see now come from IBM's attitude (especially in the later years) not to implement device support according to the standards, but to hack it so that just their hardware would work to some extent. This is not the way to develop an OS. In these days many of the really basic devices needed to operate a computer do comply to some kind of standard (USB, Firewire, AHCI). OS/2 is very week in providing proper support for those and concentrating on some specific hardware model or make doesn't help here at all.

PAUL555

Whichever strategy is used, no OS can have wide acceptance unless it can be installed easily by a non experienced user and without any tweaking required. At least the basic Core hardware - Motherboard, Sound, Video, Drives and Network Cards need to be supported without adding in new features to the new versions of the OS. Wifi, Acpi e.t.c may be additional features which many users may or may not want.

Is there any chance that IBM will release the complete code of OS/2 to Serenity or any other vendor ?

Paul

rwklein

I think if you start looking at the history of IBM and how they dealt with requests to open source OS/2 or hand over the source code they have not done. Esther Schindler (a known OS/2 author) wrote an article in I think 2006 about open sourcing OS/2.
Basically all infrastructure within IBM to support OS/2 is gone. Large customers that still have a maintenance contract, a TCO,

To get hardware support you need to make smart choices in your development environment.

One project I came up with that is being funded by Mensys and developed by Softtechnics from the Ukraine
and David Azarewicz is the project Multimac. http://svn.ecomstation.nl/multimac.
Its an as generic as possible C NIC driver skeleton. The developer then needs to take the LInux source code
and put the code in so you can get a driver that can communicate with the hardware.

The same is true for audio now that some bugs in uniaud16.sys have been taken out we just need to stay current with ALSA sources. That is what David Azarewicz is doing.

Thats how, with minimal human resources you can keep an OS on track.

Roderick Klein
Mensys

rwklein

Just as an extra foot note IBM did release up until 2004 the so called DDK which has device driver samples in it.

Overall we have enough sample code to update so it can all work better, device drivers. Thats what is currently being done for example on the USB stack. We hope to release a new set host controller drivers, USB mouse and keyboard drivers in the next few months. But its a lot of work. After that USBMSD.ADD will be worked on.

Roderick Klein
Mensys

Sigurd

Hi,

as a sidenote: if you do want to have some information about eCS2 on modern hardware and the reason why you will no longer read more from me in the os2 forums, please to take a look here:

this thread at ecs yahoo groups:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/eComStation/message/85372

Even if it is a long and time consuming thread it is worth to go through, I think.

One can read interesting things about the "need or not to need" "new features" in eCS2 that are valuable to move eCS GA from year to year, about user and programmer feedback and the way Mensys does work using some kind of "masterplan".

and finally:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/eComStation/message/85441

I wish you all the best, stay safe!

Sigurd

RobertM

Sigurd,

I do have some disagreements with some of your statements because they are based on the assumption that various human installers will have the knowledge or capability to proceed along the lines you indicate. One particular example is the "corrupt partition table" problem. One that I've known how to resolve from the WSeB days... but the simple fact is, many of the people maintaining and upgrading existing or new installations cannot figure out how to do such things, no matter how such things are spelled out to them.

Another example of that is a recent set of questions from a lurker in these forums, who is being employed/contracted out by a VERY VERY VERY VERY big company that uses OS/2. Do you know what his problems were? He couldn't figure out how to install a driver for an LNE100TX network card. I pointed him to two solutions: replacing that card with various well supported, easy to obtain cards (gave a specific list), and a link (with instructions written by me - plus what is on the page) to the NicPak page. I even pointed out which of the LNE100TX cards were supported (Linksys had close to a dozen different iterations of the card, with only about half being supported). I eveen provided direct links to each driver package that supported the various variants of the LNE100TX. So... with either option being (to you or I) the most simplistic of things to resolve, do you think he managed to resolve the issue? What do you think?

Have you ever used NicPak? If so, you know, as "ugly" as it may be, it is the EASIEST thing to use in the world, if one reads the instructions (or the even more simplified instructions that I sent along with direct links to each driver package that may be needed).

So, again, do you think he ever got the issue resolved? Do you think (in the couple weeks they were working on it) he managed to figure out how to do what for you or I would be child's play? If you answered yes, you would be wrong.

Now, using dfSee or other such tools, and the variety of other methods that you, I or other people have figured out to get around the erroneous "corrupt partition" errors may be easy for you or I (or others here), but the truth is, it's on an entirely different level than the simplicity of installing a network driver... so, if this "support" tech couldn't figure out how to properly install a network driver, with very easy instructions and every download link spelled out to him, do you think he could manage one of the "corrupt partition" workarounds? Or do you think he'd end up hosing the entire install, and perhaps hosing his Windows/Linux/whatever installation at the same time?

What's not important to you or I for such things, *IS* important to many of the customers who largely fund development on eCS. Sadly, that means in various cases, when one of those parts of eCS that we dont care about because we know every workaround in the book (and then some) is not ready, things get held up - because there are tons of "techs" out there who are not on our level when it comes to such things. If things aren't "right" for the big clients with "support techs" who know nothing (or less than nothing) about OS/2 and eCS (much less about workarounds we take for granted), then those clients dont buy. And when that happens, well, then, that's an end to things, isn't it?


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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Sigurd

#13
Hi Robert,

thank you for your words. It may be because of not using my motherlanguage to explain what I meant. You are for sure right - for a "Normal" or "Average" user the method of using DFSEE is to complex at all.

BUT - that is (only! - I could give you tons of more) one example with that I just wanted to stress that Mensys does leave no stone untourned to reschedule eCS2 from year to year with such - in my opinion - really minor reasons -  just to hide, that ACPI is not working reliable, modern powermanagment not at all!

AND - do you think most of those who are left using eCS2 are "normal" users? I guess no (and I think that was one of the OS/2 special things - you need at leat a bit of skill to install it) - if you ever tried to install eCS2 on modern (not 5 years old!) hardware, espacially notebooks, you will see - there may be a very very very few hardware configurations (less than 1%) where it may run RELIABLE (but hten without graphic or WLAN or LAN or Powermanagement or USB or....) - if you even can get it to run - it IS NOT RELIALBE NOR AN EASY INSTALLATION AT ALL.

Well, I had the "Vergnügen" to discover that the discchecker (RC7/Silver Release) just destroyed my hardware layout COMPLETLY once I tried to install it on modern netbook.

And in my opinion there is much more, proofed from a lot of installations, a lot of hardware configurations:

If a customer wants to use eCS2 for daily business  on modern hardware - I would strongly advice him to say - NO!!!! It is better to say him the truth - it is not reliable at all! To save him from even a bigger disaster. AND YES - than it is better to say "Game is over" than telling fairytales - but it may be to late at all - the eCS2 project lost image even though at all.

It is not fun for me to state these things, I wish it would be another way.

BUT AGAIN: Most painfull: Mensys/Serentiy destroyed all the faboulos work done by the community because of not delivering the MAIN part (they pronounced, advitised and promised for YEARS now) ACPI. And that is one of the reasons a lot of the most important developers said "goodbye". And they have been telling a lot of fairytales over the years just to let us software subscription useres pay and pay and pay..... for a never come true product.

If they would have the "Rückgrat" to say - YES - WE FAILED or did something wrong - NO - they are telling there fairytales on and on. And all I have written can be proofed - I wrote examples for this kind of fairytales (what is - to say - a "honest" word for what they have done.)

Thats it.

But even though - there may be another way - besides Mensys, at os2.org people are already discussing it. If it is possible or not - we will see, but it cant get worse.

So, this is all for me so far, thanks again for still being poilte to me!

Sigurd



rwklein

Hello Sigurd,

Let me put it like this. You make it sound as if ACPI is the only reason eCS 2.0 its release was delayed again and again. Thats your point of view. That point of view is far from the truth.

In does beta versions a lot of effort has gone into making JFS work better and making it a bootable file system.
I think you will see some performance difference between a HPFS file system and JFS.

A lot of effort also went into getting UNIAUD to work with HDA chipsets. In the end getting the people to work on it and coordination was done by me.

A lot of people complain about Panorama and its performance. Mensys tried a few years ago to buy the source code of SNAP but we could not reach a deal with the company that took over the source code of SNAP from Scitech. Infact we had systems in the test lab here where Scitech SNAP will just blunty crash on when PM comes up.
We would at the have liked to support more graphical chipsets but its to labour intensive.
So a dission was made...

One of the many items we also had todo was to make certain that all NIC drivers included in Genmac
could legaly be distributed with eCS. The license of eCS 2.0 was also updated so NIC drivers could be included.
If you want to try and get project management done with lawyers with some large companies.
Well its a big job... Thats why certain Atheros and Cisco NIC drivers had been removed from the Genmac package.

As to your opinion that airboot is feature creap is also far from true. Already 4 years we looked
at removing. Its true you found a method to add eCS to the Windows boot manager. And the disc checker
is not needed if you can use DFsee. But both of these scenario's are not an option for all users.
So again a kind of black and white picture view. Already around februari last year I was looking with Steve
at the issue how the boot manager could boot Windows 7. A lot of research was done for sollitions but it was
technically not possible to keep the boot manager. The estimate was made on the information around how long it
would take. But it did not make for the eCS 2.0.
We then decided to work on Airboot. If you think its feature this ticket is proof of its not "feature creap":
http://bugs.ecomstation.nl/view.php?id=2869 It was created July 2010 last year! Sadly Martin Kiewitz
it seems duo to private reasons never resolved the bug.

Somewhere around September 2009 there was a lot of comment eCS 2.0 would not easly install in virtual machines.
Based on the research of Ed Durrant from Australia Joachim worked 6 weeks to update the preboot menu
and the underlying code so it would install as *easy* as possible.

If you check the OS2WORLD archive its thanks to my research and the coding of Alex Taylor that the Windows Disc
Signature of Windows 7 and Vista does not get destroyed. People did post to the os2world forums about this problem
that it happened to them. Other OS'es also

When it comes to ACPI you will not accept that ACPI is easy. In the yahoogroups list I posted you a link to a forum
of guy thats get a kernel panic with Linux on Thinkpad T510. ACPI is far from an easy topic. 

As for the disc checker it went into a lot of testing. And just to point that Linux can also destroy eCS look at
this fresh bug just in.  http://bugs.ecomstation.nl/view.php?id=2914
For the people who don't have an eComStation.com account... Ubuntu basicly writes data to a portion of the JFS
partition and trashes LVM information. It also pooks around in the Windows NTFS according to the user.
Details can be found in the bug.

In the end we did our best. But in the end it seems to happen on more platforms data corruption.

So you paint a picture that is far from the truth Sigurd. I have never denied that communication from Mensys about the
product status is not good. But to say that we uphelt the release for only problems with ACPI is only far from true.
We do far more research and bug fixing then just trying to fix ACPI.

Everybody takes it for granted (which is there right of course) but thanks to research at Mensys done with STece
Levine eCS 2.0 and 1.2R are capable of running RSPINST from IBM and install on AMD 64 based CPU's.

I guess we should have documented that does type if features where not supported ?
Come up with fixes is extremely time consuming where work late into night.

I just had Doug Bisset on the phone yesterday and thanks to our new Multimac driver he can run on a new Thinkpad
510 (or was it 500). So it seems not all new hardware is dead with eCS.

Again there is a lot of room for improvement but call the product a failure in every retrospect is an opinion.

Regards,

Roderick Klein
Mensys