QEMU, e500 and Linux

noXLar wrote:@All

I'm interested trying out emulating OS4 on my pc.. i use a fast pc but, i'm wondering what OS version to use, i have my 460ex and the Boot Cd/ISO for OS4..
and i also have OS4 Classic for PPC boards. i don't have Pegasys OS4, is it needed?
also i read much of the information guides for made by balaton, assuming it his work.
And seems i can use what i have to make it work, but is it the best?

My pc is Win11 AMD CPU 7900X + 7900 XTX GPU.. what is the best way to get OS4 emulated on this system?

nox

Depends on the software you want to use, and how good the AltiVec emulation of QEmu is.
On a real AmigaOne/Pegasos2 with G4 CPU AltiVec optimized software can be much faster than a non-AltiVec version.

The Sam460 emulation is currently the most up-to-date of the 3 machines, but unfortunately also the worst. You cannot use SmartFileSystem

and AmigaOs4.1 Update 2 will make the machine unusable. Even simple SDL2 games like BreakHack cannot be used, the machine is simply too slow for that.

As already mentioned, the Sam460 is easy to install because you don't need any extra files and Qemu with U-Boot Bios provides everything. For simple tests the machine is sufficient,

if you want to use AmigaOs4.1 in emulation for a longer time I cannot recommend this machine at the moment.

SDL1/2 games/programs/tools BreakHack/MPlayer/DvPlayer everything runs very fast. Of course limited without 3d acceleration.

OK I forgot about that. This affects only the SFS version on the install CD but we still don't know why is that if it works on real machine. But an easy workaround is to replace it with another version that works, either from Enhancer Software or OS4Depot should work.

You've surely told me about this before but I've forgotten. What's the issue with Update 2? If Update 1 still works then maybe stay at that version for now on sam460ex until it's debugged.

Since @nox already has a real sam460ex with the corresponding version and experience installing it it's probably simplest to try that first and see how well it works emulated. An amigaone/pegasos2 version would not be that much faster, maybe just a little bit so I don't think it's worth the investment to get another version just to try it. If you start without any versiono then it's better to go with the amigaone or pegasos2 but if somebody already has sam460ex version that's also supposed to work so I'd say try that first and get other versions later when using the emulation more.

I guess you've said the same just less detailed.

What's the issue with SDL1/2 on sam460ex?

With the Update 2 kernel, the windows and mouse input stutter.

Believe me, fully configured, the AmigaOneXe/Pegasos2 machine is currently faster in all respects.

Quote:

What's the issue with SDL1/2 on sam460ex?

All programs/tools/games/ take much longer to load and are much slower to run. I'm not saying it's unusable, but compared to the Pegasos2/AmigaOnXe machine there are big differences. But I agree with you, overall the Sam460 is much faster than it was a year ago.

That doesn't matter I'll add something else....USB support is currently not working and as soon as the latest elf.library is installed as an update it causes the whole machine to stop booting. I just wanted to point this out.

I think you also had the same problem before on pegasos2 with disk cache disabled. So the fix could be either enabling cache for FFS (@joerg mentioned something about that on the other forum) or trying to use the 68k version of SFS that works and then compare that to pegasos2. You're still using disk partition instead of image file for pegasos2 so it could still be a bit faster because of that but I think most of the problems you mentioned could be avoided with using Update 1 and the 68k SFS on sam460ex and get a system that works as good as pegasos2. In case somebody is interested to try that and find out I'd like to hear about the results. At least CPU benchmarks don't show a big difference now in QEMU 9.0 so if it's still slower then that's because of something else. I'd like to find out and make sam460ex work well too because those who have that version should also be able to use it. Considering that the files on the CD of these AmigaOS versions are mostly the same apart from the kernel and modules it does not make much sense to get more of them when you already have one. Unless maybe if you're using it a lot or need different versions for testing but for normal usage any of amigaone/pegasos2 or sam460ex should be sufficient. But looks like for sam460ex there are still some more bugs to fix.

I don't remember this USB issue either. I should look at that but considering that sam460ex uses usb keyboard and mouse by default I think USB should work. What's the issue you're referring to? Maybe it's just that there aren't enough ports emulated so you'd also need to add another USB card to add more devices. The real machine has an on-board hub but that's not emulated because the hub in QEMU did not support the needed USB version if I remember correctly.

I carried out both measurements with the fastest session under Qemu. The Pegasos2 machine is currently still almost twice as fast as the Sam460 machine. I used Qemu 9 RC1 for this.

Usb-Storage "-device usb-storage,drive=ufat" cannot be used at the moment and leads to the machine not booting and a few errors being displayed via the firmware. I am not sure if this is a problem with the U-Boot firmware or if this support is simply missing.