AmigaOS 3.2 for all Classic Amigas released and available

@TSK

Program "Scout" should be able list all device commands, if NSD commands in not pressent on the cfcard device, I guess thats way.

@TSK

Yes, definitely read the manual and FAQ. There is much useful information there.

As to your memory issue, a FFS partition using 512 byte blocks (usual set up) requires about 1MB of memory per GB from my understanding. If you have a 2GB partition then that explains about 2MB or RAM being chewed up. Try 2KB or even 4KB blocks and see what that does for you ... but read the FAQ to verify and catch anything I may have forgotten or misremembered here!

@Steady

Hmmm... why would disk space affect to memory consumption? Isn't it mostly Buffers * Blocksize in this case? On NG machines people might use buffers as hundreds or even thousands, because memory isn't an issue there, but on classics I'd stay somewhere like 128 or so. And keep blocksize as 512 if there isn't a good reason and memory to make it bigger.

Buffers can be set in HDToolbox or checked (or modified temporarily) by the AddBuffers command.

I think JPV is right. On low memory machines you have to have a less partitions as possible, with as low as possible buffers set on them. Otherwise you memory will be consumed.

@TSK
I am sorry for the bad experience you had.
If possible, I would recommend to get a fast ram expansion for your system. Although 3.2 can run on computers with 2MB Ram, it would work much better with some more memory. Have in mind all the new stuff that where added, and especially reaction, which cannot be compared with the old stuff. And those new features have some cost, unfortunately, on memory consumption.

@TSK

From PE you need to install 3.2.

What you have done, I think, is create a bootable copy of the CD and replaced your boot CF card with this. You don't want to do this. What you need to do is directly read the CD on the A1200, or copy it onto some other media that you can access (even if it is a new partition on the same CF card) - all the while leaving your original boot drive in place. Then you can install 3.2 from there.

I don't know how to manually install it by copying the files; it's probably not a good idea.

If you go back to 3.1 you don't even need to switch the ROMs back (actually I'd advise against it, as you get bugfixes and improvements from the new Kickstart components - in particular the new scsi.device supports >4GB which will likely save some pain in future). See the FAQ.

I forgot to say that I have IDE-CF converter so the CF card is connected to the motherboards IDE port. I bought the old CF card from Amigakit with WB 3.1 pre-installed on it. I remember replacing the second partition with 2 new partitions and copied stuff to them on the X1000 back then some while ago. I didn't have any issues with it and I had 1,7 MB free mem after boot.

I forgot the buffer size setting completely. I formatted the other CF card with the default block size 1024. So which way I should do, smaller block size or even bigger ?

Also the old CF card with the 3.1 won't boot anymore. I don't know if it's validating and I don't want to know how long finishing it could take on such an old and slow machine.

I got an impression from the FAQ that one should not mix the 3.1 installation and 3.2 ROM's.

Reading the readme's and faq's didn't help. That long faq I won't bother to check through again.

Setting buffers to minimum helped. (It looks like 5 is the min allowed value.) Now there's 1,5 MB free ram and I was able to start installation. (Using the second CF card.) (I didn't bother to change the block size, formatting and copying all the files again.)

Thanks a lot everybody !!! :) :) :)

It looks turbo cards are not available for A1200 at the moment. Vampire would be a little bit too expensive for my needs. I might get a RAM expansion card. I couldn't find my old turbo, I might have thrown it away.

PS. I'm getting old, I forgot that buffers thing.

PPS. I was surprised that the installation finished that fast.

:) :) :)

Now I found what is that "Welcome to PE" thing. It's the Welcome utility in WBStartup. :)

@TSK

Quote:
Amiga filesystems (like SFS) have traditionally recommended to use block size of 512, which is basically good for small files and it wastes less space from the disk. But if you want to speed up handling of big files (like media files, archives, etc), then you might want to consider using bigger values... 1024 as a moderate compromise, 2048 for focusing more on the speed, or even 4096.

The bigger the value is, the more it consumes memory (buffers * blocksize bytes for each partition, 500 buffers with 1024 bs would consume 500kB of memory) and more you waste disk space (if you have a 20 bytes config file, it will take 4096 bytes from hd with 4096 bytes block size). So, I wouldn't recommend big block sizes for a boot partition, which contains thousands of small files.

In my opinion buffers have actually bigger impact on speed with many real world operations (like when deleting/scanning files) than the blocksize. So if you don't have that much memory, I would use small blocksize, but at least moderate amount of buffers. IIRC HDToolbox on 3.x had default value of 60 or 80, or something like that under 100, for buffers. IIRC SFS documentation recommended to use 128 buffers or so, and I've felt that it's quite good to have it over 100 or couple hundreds on classics. On NG I personally have raised buffers to 4096 on partitions I have lots of small files and I need to delete large amounts of files regularly, and 2048 on other partitions. It really shows in speed when you delete, for example, a system backup directory.

As said, buffers can be changed easily, but changing the block size will need a re-format of the partition. So it'd be more important to decide the block size before taking a new disk in use.

@TSK

Quote:

It says somewhere (I can't be bothered to read it again myself to see where), that you need to copy the old intuition.library and workbench.library off of one of the disks. I'm not sure why/if the old Intuition is needed, but workbench.library used to be in ROM on the A1200 - so you won't be able to fully boot without adding it to libs:.

edit actually, it may be icon.library not intuition.library which is needed on disk.

@Steady
Quote:
Just to clear up: the RAM needed by FFS in this fashion is only needed for partition validation, and is not consumed when validation is not happening. Validation is only required as part of the formatting procedure, or when a volume bitmap becomes invalid, e.g. after an interrupted write operation like turning off power while saving.

The RAM required for validation is directly related to the number of blocks, not the partition size, so increasing the block size (which decreases the number of blocks in a given partition) reduces the RAM requirement.

@jPV
Quote:
Indeed, the main memory usage comes from the buffers. With a larger blocksize, the number of buffers can be reduced without significantly impacting performance since ultimately the same amount of data is cached, but regardless of the size, you get to an area of diminishing returns between 100-200 buffers; adding more buffers beyond that produces a more or less undetectable difference in performance, so is essentially a waste of RAM.

Quote:
As you point out, PFS and SFS both recommend (or even enforce) a 512-byte block size, but FFS does have good reasons for using a larger block size.

Quote:
I actually have the opposite experience, and conducted extensive testing a few years back on many different combinations. Everyday use cases (boot time, copying large directories containing mixtures of large and small sized files, unarchiving and archiving mixed files, seeking large files) showed dramatic improvements in speed with block size increases. These improvements started levelling out around 8192 bytes, with some improvements seen going to 16384, and no significant improvement going to 32768. With all block sizes, the difference made by buffers was less noticeable once you reached a number equivalent to around 100 512-byte buffers (around 50kB of RAM), and practically no difference at all at around 100kB of RAM.

An additional advantage of larger blocksizes comes down to the use of modern flash-based drives, which have an internal block size of 4kB. While they still support 512-byte operations for compatibility, writing in particular can be significantly sped up when a 4kB block size is used.

@kas1e

I am experimenting more with AmigaOS 3.2 running on e-uae running on AmigaOS4.1 FE Update 2 on my MicroA1 computer.

Looks quite nice with Picasso96 and UAEGfx.

Currently using the following screenmode setting:
uaegfx: 640x480 32bit BGRA

Emulating an A1200 with 2 MB chipRAM, 8 MB fastRAM and 8 MB graphics memory.

KickA1200.rom

cpu_type=68020/68881
chipset=AGA
ntsc=true
cpu_speed=max
cpu_compatible=no
cpu_24bit_addressing=no
chipmem_size=4
fastmem_size=8
gfxcard_size=8

gfx_fullscreen_amiga=yes
gfx_fullscreen_picasso=yes
gfx_linemode=double
#gfx_width=640
#gfx_height=480
gfx_center_horizontal=true
gfx_center_vertical=true


I was trying much higher settings for fastmem_size and gfxcard_size but ran out of physical RAM. Right now these settings are scaled back drastically just to get it working. I will increase next time I play further.

Anyways, seems to work fine so far. I need to test some more programs to see how well they work with this configuration.

---
redfox

@Daedalus

Yes, you are correct. Thanks Daedalus.

@Daedalus

interesting stuff thanks for posting. The 'ideal' block size issue has been debated for quite a while eh