Pegasos2 with RadeonHD/RX via bridge

It looks like great improvement !

Please, did somebody tested AGP connector for this?
( which is in real PCI 66 MHz 32-bit bus in our Pegasos 2 )

According to AGP connector pinout, there are missing some PCI signals. Most important is LOCK#. I am not sure if we need this signal for graphics card or PCIe bridge.
There are many working SATA, NIC and RAID PCI cards connected to AGP, but also many RAID cards not working, probably due to missing LOCK#.

In any case, I have passive AGP-to-PCI adapter and I can test something if needed.

@sailor
I tedted those agp adapters from ebay few pages back: didnt work, but check for more info in previos posts about, maybe you will have some ideas.. i also wrote to author, but have no answer

@kas1e
Thanks. I will read it and make some tests. At least I will try also some SATA cards in AGP connector, not to be unused if you manage to work a PCIe card in 33 MHz connector.

P.S.: this year was quite hectic for me health-wise and work-wise, so I hope that next year I will have a lot more time for Amigas.

@kas1e
I have read this whole thread and there is only one thing that is not very clear to me.
When you recommend the ‘pericom’ bridge, I see on startech.com that they only have a model that converts PCI to PCIe (short) so how the hell do you connect an HD/RX there?
Or is it that there are graphics cards in PCie (mini) HD/RX ?

thx

@Estrayk

Quote:

PCIe x1-x16 adapters are fairly inexpensive.

Quote:

The Radeon 6450 seems to have been the last card available in PCI or PCIe x1 versions.

@EstraykQuote:

Look here on part 3.1 https://www.amigaportal.cz/node/149415 (Czech language).
Exactly this configuration I have in my Sam440ep-flex for years.

@sailor
woahhh what a lot of information, this is just what I was looking for. Thanks to both sailor and Rob, I'm going to read it all.

@Estrayk
Yeah, as Rob and sailor point out i just use PCIe x1-x16 adapter, so it's out of the box for now. See how it looks like on this video: https://youtu.be/ArQVvVlz_a0?t=492

Starting from 8:12 till 8:25 you can see adapter fit into PCI, and then RadeonHD (in video it was RadeonHD) i put to adapter itself.

ps. And it will work only with unreleased kernel :( Hans did fix all issues to make RadeonRx/HD cards works on peg2 via bridge, but this kernel is in beta. Usuing BBOOT will also not help, as BBOOT only fix some of issues which enough for emulated hardware, but for real one there were in needs some more fixes, which is in beta-kernel for now.

Oh wow! This is great news! So is there a chance we might be able to use RadeonHD on our Peg2 in future?

@Reth
Quote:

Of course, just do not know when it will be released. Both and RadeonHD and RadeonRX works.

Wow, thats increadible. If they even might get 3D support some day this could be a huge boost for the Peg2 users.

@Reth
Quote:

Warp3DNova (so and ogles2, and novabridge, and minigl) works for sure. I can run Spencer for example, or any gl4es based game on my real pegasos2 with RadeonRX via bridge. Even accelerated video through Emotion or DvPlayer works. I were in hope to made some big video with all info and tests about, just not finished it yet.

Speed wise it also "ok". After Hans made some improvements for bridges in radeon drivers, it start to behave a little bit better in compare with how it was at first working tests..

In last tests we did, the results on my 1ghz non-overcloked pegasos2 with radeonrx were:



Not that bad imho.

Though we as always ReadPixelArray and WritePixelArray again, not as fast as we can hope, but for casual everyday use you will not notice differences with radeon9250 in this regards (while, radeon9250's WPA/RPA are much faster, still).

@kas1e
There were some changes in latest QEMU 10.0 that might now support older AMD and ATI cards. Previously vfio-pci only worked with RadeonHD and newer but somebody with an older card could test if it works now with those. Those cards have driver in AmigaOS and may have less problems with VRAM access so if they work it could be an option too. Only problem is that most of those were AGP but there are a few PCIe and even PCI ones. I have an ATI X550 PCIe card with RV370 that I could test but that seems to be missing support from both AmigaOS and MorphOS even if it's similar to other cards that are supported. Could support be added for it? Or what are PCIe cards supported by the Radeon driver?

So is there already a possibility to use something else than the SiliconMotion 502 chip together with QEmu for Peg2 emulation?

@Reth
Quote:

With QEMU you not need to wait for kernel fixes: there one of fixes needs for real hardware only. But other fixes like BAR addressing and co, can be dealt outside of kernel (while it not released), by usage Balaton's BBOOT ( (replacement for amigaboot.of), so you use this one with QEMU and can have RadeonHD/RX working as well (check other threads here about passthrough usage)

@Reth
Not on Windows or macOS. On Linux host you can try passing through real GPUs (or other hardware such as NVMe, network or other cards) and if you're lucky it may work but it's experimental and not fully understood yet what's needed. This won't be supported on other hosts as it's a Linux kernel feature not available elsewhere.

@kas1e

Thank you. I saw the other threads but did not yet correlate them to QEmu usage to emulate a Peg2. Since I am using QEmu including BBoot there is a better possibility to use GFX Chips than 502 Silikon Motion already?

According to latest post of @Balaton here this does not seem to be the case though - at least not for Windows (where I am using QEmu from).

@kas1e

I know it's a bit off-topic for this thread, but I wanted to ask you if there is any advantage of using Balaton's BBOOT instead of the amigaboot.of from AmigaOS4.1 upd.1 to boot the system on a Pegasos-II.

@Estrayk

Not sure but it only "fixes" if the card is "behind" a bridge (PCI/PCIe -> AGP) or something lika that.

IIRC upcoming kernel (2 more weeks ) will fix what bboot does.

@Estrayk
It boots faster with BBoot because it reads all modules in one zip instead of loading them one by one so less disk activity. Besides fixing 64bit BARs that's only relevant for newer cards with a PCIe bridge, BBoot also fixes an interrupt issue possibly avoiding lost interrupts with multiple PCI devices so could avoid some hangs caused by that. The drawback is that you need to keep Kickstart.zip up to date but that's not much work since Kickstart dir is not changed often, you just have to remember to zip it when it was changed.

The upcoming kernel will fix more than what BBoot fixes and allows using PCIe bridges that BBoot alone does not do on real machine (for QEMU it's enough as the bridges are handled by the host in that case). After updated kernel (or if don't need the fixes) you can still use only the boot part without the PCI fixes part by setting bboot configuration variable in firmware as described in the readme. Disabling some messages with bboot variable may also make boot a bit faster on real machine.