What the fastest possible x64 emulation way of OS4 today ?

VERY interesting stuff has been published here

Seems to allow running Warp3D/MiniGL stuff inside emulation. Maybe also higher screen resolutions. I have not yet tested this on my own.

@MickJT

Late but short questions: How did you incorporate and utilise uaehf.device & uaenet.device in your config for AOS4.1?

Also anything that can be done to increase refresh rate when using uaegfx? I am now able to use native laptop resolution but screen layout still renders quite slowly - same speed in 8, 16 and 32 bit. Are there any settings for this I need to change within WinUAE?
Also when using the UAEGFX my display, windows and texts in Codebench are getting scrambled in higher resolutions (e.g. above 1280x1024) or yellow background in windows in 1280x1024.
Are there any UAE-Config settings I would need to adjust to get this corrected or anything else?

@kas1e What the fastest possible x64 emulation way of OS4 today ?

QEMU v8!

Moved out of curiosity after I watched the videos by Rene Engel (https://www.youtube.com/@reneengel2258) I have order a copy of AmigaOS 4.1 FE for Pegasos 2 at (https://www.amiga-shop.net/en/Amiga-So ... 1-Final-Edition::689.html).

After trying a few times, I succeed running AmigaOS 4.1 FE on QEMU 8.0 rc1 emulating a Pegasos 2 and I must admint I am quite impressed by its performance.
The overall speed is so good that the system is quite usable, light years ahead of the sluggish experience I obtain when emulating a Sam460ex running AmigaOS 4.1 FE on the same linux x86_64 laptop.
Is still slower than running AmigaOS on my real Sam460ex, particularly true when writing on the HD, but it might be due to the fact that I was forced to format the HD with FFS and not SFS, because I am unable to mount any partition formatted SFS.

At the moment the ISO with AmigaOS 4.1 FE for Pegasos 2 cannot be launched directly, because the ATI Radeon emulation on QEMU is not mature enough.
So, in order to launch AmigaOS, I had to manually copy the SM501 video drivers from the AmigaOS ISO for my Sam460, as the AmigaOS ISO for the Pegasos 2 does not contain these drivers. In order to modify the original ISO image I installed the UltraISO app for Windows (https://www.ultraiso.com/), and these are the list of files I added:

In order to load the SM501 driver (“siliconmotion502.chip”) when booting AmigaOS, I had to edit and modify two files:

I then turned to my Ubuntu 22.04 linux laptop and compiled the v8.0 rc1 of QEMU following

Prior to being able to build qemu, I had to install some additional packages on Ubuntu

Once QEMU was compiled and installed, I then created an 20GB HD image file entering

As the Pegasos openfirmware ROM is closed source, it does not comes with QEMU, so I had to retrieve it manually. On the Linux terminal I used these commands to download a BPlan firmware update file, a script to extract the ROM and then execute the script to obtain the "pegasos2.rom" file

I then launched QEMU with the following command

At the openfirmware prompt I entered
At the first boot I partitioned the HD with two partitions, a DH0 partition with FFS (could not make SFS work so far), and DH1 partition for SWAP.
At the second boot, I proceed into Workbench, quick formatted DH0, and then I could install AmigaOS on it.
I then switched off QEMU and re-launched but this time without the cdrom with the following command

At the openfirmware prompt I entered and you are good to go.

I am very much grateful to Balaton Zoltan, it is thanks to his huge work that we will be able to enjoy this great performance increase emulating AmigaOS 4.1!! More info at
http://zero.eik.bme.hu/~balaton/qemu/amiga/
and
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-ppc/

Some additional infos are available in a post on amiga-news.de also.

@Virgola
Sounds good that pegasos2 emulation are in now. For me Sam460 emulation in QEMU was really bad expiriene and looks pretty "raw" and buggy. It was much slower than WinUAE on the same hardware, have random DSIs, slower boot times, unability to use SFS for boot devices, etc ,etc. WinUAE in this regards were really winner. The boot times difference was really big one, like winaue 15 seconds for full 1920x1080 workbench ready to use, and QEMU/sam460 for about a minute.


On video from your link i see the working resolution of workbench are pretty low. With WinUAE emulation 1920x180 are fine and fast, because it can emulate gfx card with lot of memory, so compositing and stuff working, etc, and move of windowses and opening of drawers are fast.

Can QEMU with peg2 emulation now with this SM501 card emulation give you ability to use full 1920x1080 desktop with compositing, and all windowses opening/moving/resizing be fast as in winuae ?

@Virgola
Btw, is KVM working then now ? Can we use macintosh with QEMU to emulation pegasos2 and have decent speed because of KVM ?

Rene's Installation guide is also available in an English-language translation:

https://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2023-03-00113-EN.html

@virgola
Quote:Make sure you don't access any SFS partitions on both AmigaOS 4.x and MorphOS, the different SFS versions aren't 100% compatible. The AROS port of SFS is worse and even more incompatible to both the AmigaOS and MorphOS versions of SFS.
Running MorphOS on an AmigaOS 4.x SFS partition, or the other way round, may or may not destroy the contents. Using an AROS or Linux SFS versions on an AmigaOS SFS partition will definitely destroy it.

@joerg
It's the same issue i meet when test QEMU with Sam460 emulation : it just can't handle SFS at all (or at least, at boot times, or to handle it as boot device, dunno). Of course no other filesystem's were involved,etc.

I just found this issue after 3-4 tried to install os4 on qemu just like i did on winuae, and fail, then find out that it works only with FFS (while with WinUAE all ok, so should be no issue with SFS exactly, but probably just issue with sam460 emulation or so).

@kas1e
Apparently it's QEMU emulating the Pegasos2 hardware using the Paegaos2 OpenFirmware, which includes it's own implementation of SFS (and FFS(2), ISO9660, etc. file systems), just like U-Boot does on the A1/Sam/X5k.
In any case the Firmware filesystem implementations are much more limited than the "real" AmigaOS/MorphOS ones, for example the firmware versions are read-only.
FFS(2) and ISO9660 are very simple, partially more than 40 years old, and very well documented file systems and there is next to nothing which can go wrong in such a simple re-implementation in a firmware. SFS is a little bit more complex...

@kas1e

Being user of a Sam460ex (AmigaOS 4.1 FE), WinUAE (AmigaOS 3.x and 4.1FE) and QEMU (Sam460ex and now Pegasos2 emulated machines) I can assure you that QEMU+Pegasos2+AOS4.1FE feels as fast as WinUAE+OS4.1FE.

Sure, the boot time is quite higher with QEMU compared with WinUAE, but the overall speed of using the system is comparable.
Sure, being limited to a SM501 video card that has only 64MB of video RAM is quite limiting: 16bit depth screens only (no 24bit nor 32bit), and the maximum resolution is 1280x800.
Other than that, I feel the overall graphic performance is comparable, if not better than WinUAE, and yes, compositing can be turned ON.
Being limited to FFS disks is also a pain at the moment, but hey, this is the first release of QEMU supporting such Pegasos2+AOS4.1FE, so it is quite promising indeed.

I discovered that the SM401 device in QEMU supports the "vram-size" additional parameters, but I think there is an hardcoded maximum RAM limit of 64MB.
I have tried to set 128MB passing the parameter "-device sm501,vram-size=134217728", but QEMU replied

I would love to test QEMU+Pegasos2+AOS4.1FE on a PowerPC machine enabling KVM, but I haven't got any already PowerPC CPU Book3s machine already setup with Linux, at the moment got only a PowerPC CPU Book3e (NXP T2080).

@Virgola
For me resolution and boot times matter.. But yeah, progress is good. Hope ATI card emulation will be added soon, and then there will be no limits of depth/screensize.

@Joerg
Quote:

It's only recently peg2 emulation were added, before it was only possible to use sam460 emulation. Dunno through if it is general issue with QEMU not being able to use SFS, or sam460 emulation only.. But Vigrola in previous topic seems to confirm that have same issue with peg2 emulation too.

@virgola
I tried Pegasos with 4.1 with SM502

The impression is excellent.

Would you like to do a more detailed guide

Now tonight I put Linux back on HD Real

I have backup I need to find a hard disk

here I tried it with WSL2 but just to see how it was.

I edited the iso but the steps weren't very clear at least for me.

Some screenshots of the steps to take would be very helpful.

Furthermore, the topic of updates and installation on hard-disk and many other things could be extended for everyone

Thank you.

I also wrote to you on EAB in the "OtherWinUAE" section

here my little test:
https://youtu.be/F7RxRrlpJ4w

@whiteQuote:


Hello my friend....we know each other from WinUae back then you still told me Qemu would not be usable

I wrote the installation guide on Amiga-News and tested the Pegasos 2 emulation for about 3 months in cooperation with BALATON Zoltan .

I watched your short video , normally AmigaOs4.1 should boot without delay with you there is a bit longer pause. You could use the older SM502 from update 3 which fixes this delay. As you can see here on my video:

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1XTyNPEkWk

Also SFS is possible, but only the 68k version, just replace the SmartFileSystem in System/Kickstart with the SmartFileSystem from https://aminet.net/search?query=sfs on your AmigaOs4.1 Install Iso.

@Maijestro

Hi Maijestro
I'm glad it works,
I replaced "SM502" now the boot is instantaneous.

While for the "sfs" filesystem on reboot with:
boot hd:0 amigaboot.of

it tells me that the SFS "filesysten" is not supported
and I can't boot, while with FFS everything works.

Which SFS should I choose for "68k" or for "OS4" in the archive ?

Anyway, it's very interesting and I was just working on it right now.

Yesterday I received a 250 GB SSD for 20 euros from Amazon
so i put back the old linux backup by updating it.
So I work better.

Until now I was working with "WSL2"

(( I sent you a private message. ))

Thanks, I really appreciate the suggestions.

One of the issues I have with Qemu is that the network device stops working from time to time, especially when heavy usage is happening. I think it is an issue on Qemu side, because even if I reboot OS4 the problem remains.

Are you aware of some limitations? I can share more info if you want, but I followed the guide on amiga-news to setup a Pegasos with SM502.

@walkero

when I reset linux it was outdated since august.
But something has changed for me in the latest versions of Qemu
So I had to reconfigure "SLIRP"

I had problems with "Meson" Like this:

$ sudo apt-get install git libglib2.0-dev libfdt-dev libpixman-1-dev zlib1g-dev ninja-build meson

$ git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/slirp/libslirp.git

$ cd libslirp

$ meson build

$ sudo ninja -C build install

$ cd ..

$ cd qemu

$ mkdir -p bin/debug/native

$ cd bin/debug/native

$ ../../.././configure --enable-slirp --enable-debug

$ make -j$(nproc)

$ sudo make install

$ cd ../../..

-------------

qemu:
./configure --target-list=ppc-softmmu -enable-slirp

sudo apt full-upgrade -y

reboot

----------------------

seems to work fine here

@walkeroQuote:

Also for this there is a solution with FE Update 1 or 2 the rtl8139 driver of AmigaOs4.1 FE Pegasos 2 was updated, this makes problems under Qemu please replace the rtl8139 driver by the somewhat older driver of the Pegasos 2 Install Iso.

You can find it in system/devs/Networks

With this the network is stable and there are no more internet crashes.

@Maijestro

Nothing to do "sfs" doesn't work for me

But are you using "SFS" on the main AmigaOS partition?

Also at the end of updates 1 and 2 I can't reboot to activate the updates.

Do you use any utility or command to restart ?

Thank you.

@whiteQuote:

Please use 68k version, Aos4.x version will not work.

@Maijestro
I tried the iso, but the problems are the same

Also even if I use FFS updates 1&2 eventually require a reboot.

Which I can't do I tried both locally and also online.