What the fastest possible x64 emulation way of OS4 today ?

So I'm battling with a number of different issues now, most of which lie with the potatoe pressing the keys on the keyboard!

So far, I haven't worked out how to get monitor output AND serial output. I mean, I can get monitor output but it's in a tiny window and any info command just scrolls off the screen. Maybe I can be specific about which PCI device I want info on. Hmmm.

I do currently have SM501 device as well but the guest isn't initialising it.

It would be a good idea now for me to throw my config in here in case I have something wrong as my brain is a bit fried right now.

@kas1e

How could you forget about my frankenmiggy solution for the sam440

https://www.amigans.net/modules/newbb/ ... id=124483#forumpost124483

But be aware that the vbios might not get initialised. So after the bars have been handled, it might also be necessary to port the sam460 uboot x86 interpreter.

@MartinW
You can redirect both monitor and serial with -serial mon:stdio then try Ctrl-A h for help. Basically you can change betseen the two with Ctrl-A c. There are other options, if you don't want to type in serial you can redirect that to file or there are even options to open pipes or tcp ports so you could connect with telnet or netcat but I don't know the syntax for those, they should be in the QEMU docs.

There's also some doc on BAR values here https://wiki.osdev.org/PCI#Base_Address_Registers and if I got that right the lower part of the address goes in the second 32 bit BAR so maybe if you have BAR0 64 bit you may need to declare it as BAR1 32 bit so the OS tries to write 0x14 not 0x10 which would map the device too high (i.e. 0x9000000000000000 instead of 0x90000000) but I'm not sure what I say makes sense, I'm just guessing so check with info mtree and other info commands first.

Leave this with me - I need to do some work on my OS4 install but it's looking promising!

@geennaam

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Well interpreter is written PowerPC code, and PowerPC is emulated by QEMU, so it should not be needed, unless it’s too slow or timing is off.

(it might be problem with Pegasus II emulation, does not have that.)

OK, just to update, I think this is fully working using a Sapphire HD5450. I had to purchase Enhancer 2.2 for the drivers. Without them I could tell stuff was booted and running but I had no video, but now it seems good.

Resolution is 1920x1080@32bit, frame rates seem OK and Mace Demo fully works at a decent frame rate. This is the first time I've seen that game properly on OS4. I own it on Steam but under FE Classic emulation it was always missing sprites and stuff. Bear in mind, this is considered a low-end GPU.

I've had a couple of system freezes but each time it was when I was doing something network intensive. If I can work out how you do screenshots on OS4 I'll post some screenshots of the PCI resources as OS4 sees it.

There's still quite a bit I need to do. I haven't changed the mapping for the integrated audio. I don't know if that would work if I did and clearly this isn't an end-user friendly solution by any stretch of the imagination.

I would like to work out how to enable the HDMI output from the card, if that's possible because my DVI to HDMI isn't long enough and I've had to raise the machine up on blocks of wood for the cable to reach :D

I'll consider passing through a network card too if I have a supported one and see if that helps with the freezes I've been seeing. I will also see if I can get my RX580 passed through as well but I'm unsure what to do on the addressing for that as one of the memory regions is within 64bit. I need to read the documentation.

@MartinW
Brilliant! Thank you for testing the theory and proving it. Even if it's not a user friendly way and may need people to write their own script for now just documenting what chagnes are needed could help some and we may be able to do a more user friendly script based on that or incorporate it in my boot loader once I finish that. How is it with the car ROM? Does the VGA BIOS of the HD5450 runs with tthe pegasos2 firmware without problems or it seems that's not needed as long as the BARs show up in AnimgaOS?

@LiveForIt
The pegasos2 firmware also has x86 BIOS emulator similar to the sam460ex u-boot but the one in pegasos2 seems to be older and has problems running some newer card ROMs which might be needed for init'ing the card. Unfortunately, unlike the sam460ex firmware, the pegasos2 ROM is not fully open source so we can't update the BIOS support in it only replace it. The x86 emulator in sam460ex firmware already works on PowerPC so porting to that is not needed but porting to run on pegasos2 instead of sam460ex is needed as these use different firmwares and the firmware is hardware specific so you can't use the sam460ex firmware on a pegasos2.
Anyway we have a mostly clear path to make this work, it just needs more time to work on it to make it reality.

@balaton

At the moment I'm not blocking the ROM with romfile="" and qemu does spit out a lot of errors on boot. Further I have to type blind, either the failsafe command or just the boot command since everything else needs no intervention now. It gets there.

I just tried to boot with the rom blocked (romfile="") and OS4 cannot init the card, although there are enough manual steps here that I need to be sure I'm typing the correct thing each time. I think I did! :


Network is completely unusable with GPU passthrough. Seems fine without. So clearly there is more work needed here.

[EDIT] I should actually read what I post! Yes, the debug info clearly says it cannot find the ROM signature and so closes. So that begs the question, does it just need the signature to be somewhere, or does it need the actual ROM? If it's just the signature then that might be able to be supplied without actually loading it. Not that it's really a problem to load it, it just makes the boot process that bit more awkward.

@MartinW
As for the network related freezes, if this could be debugged to find the reason it might be possible to fix but for that we would need some more info on what happens or a way to reliably reproduce it. It sounds like it may be a missing interrupt or I don't really know because all the report so far had not much more info than that it does not work but not enough details to tell why.

@balaton

Yes, and right now all I really know is that as soon as I try to transfer a file it only gets a packet or two in and freezes the transfer. If I then try to interact with a window the whole OS freezes and I have to kill the emulator.

At the end of the day, I was intending to look at writing a driver for the qemu card rather than using an emulated rtl8139 but that's months away if I can even get my head round it at all.

@MartinW
The errors you see with the ROM is not actially from QEMU but from the BIOS emulator in the pegasos2 firmware. The driver needs the ROM as it contains tables with info about the card that it reads but may not need the ROM to actually run or maybe it just runs enough for it to get the card in a state good enough for the driver but can't set it up for text mode to get output during the firmware. This may be annoying but if it works after booting then maybe it's not a problem.

Do the network card and GPU share an interrupt? Is there a way to list that under AmigaOS? If you boot a ppc linux on pegasos2 with passed through card you could get these info with lspci -v and cat /proc/interrupts I think.

@balaton
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OK, understood. Obviously before all of this, Qemu was a bit of a black box to me. It's gradually opening up.

Quote:

That is something I will need to investigate. Morphos might tell me something there as well. I can probably access that quicker than I can get a linux guest setup. I'll take a look.

I also need to properly map the audio side of the card as well.

@MartinWQuote:

There is no AmigaOS4 driver for HDMI audio at the present time, so it could be left as-is (for now).

@Martin
Wowow ! So, it was just he BARs only ? Or together with regs and stuff ? I mean, if you can fully document what need to do by steps when one hit "OF" prompt , then it can help a lot for my futher tests with real pegasos2.

It's of no problems on real peg2 that i will have no see OF on the card until os4 boot, because i can just use serial terminal for operate with OF (just like it's guest/host with QEMU).

As far as i understand, all i will need is just throw necessary commands (for now manually) and then boot os4, and it should work.

Temped to get those damn PCI to PCIE bridges in my hands!

ps. Can you plz check one warp3d stuff for me plz (just so to know, if we have general issue with drivers, or it issues with slow speed of os4 hardware) : download plz this : http://os4depot.net/share/development ... ary/graphics/irrlicht.lha

Then unpack, and run from the shell 03.Quake3 demo. Then choose "OpenGL", and do nothing, to see how much FPS you will have in the windows title bar. If you can, of course.

Thanks in advance !

@derfs
Do you have real pegasos2 as well ? Maybe you had PCI to PCIe bridge lying around to test ? I only can have bridge in next 2-3 weeks only, so can't test myself.

@derfs

Well, that saves some effort I think I can just not pass that device through as they are mapped as independent devices I believe. I am reaching the point of just how far do I want to go with this now.

@kas1e

First of all, my currently passed through GPU has no 3D support. That is a known thing, it's too old. 2D only as far as I know. I can download that demo tonight and try, but if it's really Quake3 then I imagine it will be a slide-show. Remember for now this is a Radeon HD5450 only.

As for changing the mapping then it might be just as easy if you post the output from the properties of the device in OpenFirmware and I can create the commands. Hmm... it's not what we really want but I'm sure I could create a utility to generate an OF patch script from the device output on Mac / Linux, far, far quicker than I could learn how to do it in Forth.

So, find your graphics card in OpenFirmware. It's going to be something like "/pci/display@2" - if you have more than one, make sure it's the right one.

Then, at the of prompt, type the following (this is from memory, apologies if there are errors):



Paste the output here. I'm particularly interested in the Reg property and the Assigned Addresses property.

Please note, people, that I'm not prepared to sit here and do it dozens of times. But I can do it once or twice before I write something to do it if it helps people with real hardware. I hadn't quite grasped that this effort was potentially benefitting physical Pegasos2 owners as well!

For now I have work to crack on with.

[edit] It's a shame you're not in the UK - I'm about to send a PCI-PCIe bridge back to Amazon as it's not what I need :D

@kas1eQuote:

Sorry, I dont have an actual Peg2. The only OS4 H/W I have is a X5000/20.

@MartinWQuote:

Impressive performance, good work. What hardware did you use for the test?

Even though it's not yet user-friendly and there are still more problems to be solved, this is a big step forward. Thank you very much for your support.

@MartinW

I am using a R9 R270 2Gb graphics card as passthrough, and I have the latest Radeon and 3D drivers if you think its worth trying?