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Operating System Specific Discussions => AROS Research Operating System => Topic started by: alex on December 15, 2012, 07:43:01 PM
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I hope I'm not covering old ground here but I'm very interested in people's opinion on aros 68k running on native hardware of various configurations.
I have a a3000 with cybervision, 68060, and various zorro cards that I honestly could live without other than the networking card which I don't remember which brand I kept in it at the moment.
I also have an a1200 with an 030 card.
I would love to gather intel on your experiences and suggestions based on my configs.
Thanks in advance
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AROS 68k is still not optimized to the point that it is usable on an '030. This will come in the future though.
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The 060 should be fine though. I think most people have 2 different boot partitions for AROS 68k and AmigaOS. AROS is getting there slowly but does already have some software that the AmigaOS does not. I think the Cybervision would be supported but I would double check as it's very important to have an RTG card. AROS Vision is probably the way to go:
http://www.natami-news.de/html/distribution_download.html
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i wouldnt call 030 a satysfying option for aros68k currently. even with 060 the user experience is sluggish, but about usable.
the situation is such: 68k applications run in most cases with usual speed. what is slow may be user interaction due to zune (mui clone) not being optimized enough. such is also alas the performance of wanderer (workbench replacement) which is built upon zune and contains several bugs (especially listing files in detailed mode) and oddities, that make it not as usable.
also loading binaries is noticeably slower than on original aos. generally the system is still more crashy and not tested enough due to apparent general lack of interest alas.
there are several contributions to aros that already run under aros68k, mostly games and demos, and most noticeably the aros owb web browser. unfortunatelly the executable alone is about 40mb big and loads very slowly especially parsing ttf fonts (about 2 minutes if you dont feed it with too much fonts). it is usable on simple pages but complex css loaded sitest load pretty slowly.
you can use whatever zorro rtg card you can find p96 driver for i think. i used picasso4 and cybervision64. but you will have to add the appropriate *.card and *.chip drivers to bootstrap command in the startup-sequence to have them available. then simply choos the desired rtg resolution in screenmode prefs.
you can also use an network card to connect to the net. having a router the setting should be pretty straightforward. get the appropriate 68k device copied into your devs/networks and choose it under network prefs. your card should run under arostcp stack with default automatic settings. note that imho arostcp is slow in comparison to miamidx i have used under aros68k on my a4k previously.
to tell the truth, aros 68k may be a lot of fun testing and trying to contribute to development but is not yet a real alternative to an end user, except maybe on winuae. if you seriously want to give it a shot, i can guide you through and likely answer many questions. setting up a system is not complicated at all. its just downloading a nightly (or a distro) to a hd you should be able to boot from it as it is, whatever hardware you got. no messing with appropriate cpu libs, aros setpatch will take care of it for you.
you may also head to aros-exec.org for further assistance.
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What prevents it from running on an 68000?
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What prevents it from running on an 68000?
nothing afaik. except it would be awfully slow (to boot) and you will need some more ram. aros needs about 6meg to run i think..
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can it run shapeshifter/fusion?
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can it run shapeshifter/fusion?
possibly. i have not tried that. what stops you?
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Yesterday I booted a minimal Wanderer floppy disk on a A1200 020 14 MHZ + 8 MB FAST. Alltogether it took 3 MB of RAM to use it: 1 MB for AROS Kickstart + 2 MB for Wanderer and libs (including core Zune/MUI). As said, Wanderer was slugish in such configuration, but what I observed it is down to parts of Wanderer itself and not Zune. Also loading time was noticably longer than in case of OS3.1, even when later tested from HDD. Generally I think slugishness of Wanderer should be improved first as this will give better user experience on all configs.
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@deadwood
there are several platform independent issues to fix i think.
- as mentioned by jason already in the past, the long boot
- slow loading of executables
- improving speed of wanderer, zune, fixing lister functionality (kalamatee not seen around for long, likely will never see his fixes)
- some sort of control of vram usage, monitoring and handling of out of memory situations.
- enforcer with segtracker functionality for better debug, toni claims to be to lazy for that boring task
...
what comes to my mind.
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I think 68030 should be the minimum target for aros 68, since most accelerated amigas have at least that. Should be optimized for 68030+
Anyhow, glad its here, and glad AROS got to come "home" to 68k. Its a cool full circle kinda thing that I never expected.
It also kills the amiga grave robbers from continuing to rob people for AOS for classics.
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certainly 68000 and even 68020 doesnt make practically much sense, but theoretically aros should run on as wide choice of hardware as possible, including as low as there is. currently aros68k nightly is compiled for 68000 so fai i know. of course it means it is not the 68k higher end optimal, but i guess this is not the main issue with it anyway. i would try to aviod introducing incompatibilities and overly optimizing it for just one system choice. as long as expected speedup is under 200% it isnt currently worth bothering anyway.
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i wouldnt call 030 a satysfying option for aros68k currently. even with 060 the user experience is sluggish, but about usable.
the situation is such: 68k applications run in most cases with usual speed. what is slow may be user interaction due to zune (mui clone) not being optimized enough. such is also alas the performance of wanderer (workbench replacement) which is built upon zune and contains several bugs (especially listing files in detailed mode) and oddities, that make it not as usable.
also loading binaries is noticeably slower than on original aos. generally the system is still more crashy and not tested enough due to apparent general lack of interest alas.
there are several contributions to aros that already run under aros68k, mostly games and demos, and most noticeably the aros owb web browser. unfortunatelly the executable alone is about 40mb big and loads very slowly especially parsing ttf fonts (about 2 minutes if you dont feed it with too much fonts). it is usable on simple pages but complex css loaded sitest load pretty slowly.
you can use whatever zorro rtg card you can find p96 driver for i think. i used picasso4 and cybervision64. but you will have to add the appropriate *.card and *.chip drivers to bootstrap command in the startup-sequence to have them available. then simply choos the desired rtg resolution in screenmode prefs.
you can also use an network card to connect to the net. having a router the setting should be pretty straightforward. get the appropriate 68k device copied into your devs/networks and choose it under network prefs. your card should run under arostcp stack with default automatic settings. note that imho arostcp is slow in comparison to miamidx i have used under aros68k on my a4k previously.
to tell the truth, aros 68k may be a lot of fun testing and trying to contribute to development but is not yet a real alternative to an end user, except maybe on winuae. if you seriously want to give it a shot, i can guide you through and likely answer many questions. setting up a system is not complicated at all. its just downloading a nightly (or a distro) to a hd you should be able to boot from it as it is, whatever hardware you got. no messing with appropriate cpu libs, aros setpatch will take care of it for you.
you may also head to aros-exec.org for further assistance.
Warzon, I might have to take you up on your offer at some point. The prospect of running AROS on native hardware may be to enticing to pass up. Considering we will most likely never see an AmigaOS 68k update ever again and I'm currently trying to determine the best native system to run AROS x86, it would be nice to move all my Amiga-like experiences in the same direction.
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There isn't much difference between optimizing code for 020 and 030. The 030 gets most it's performance increase from internal pipeline improvements and the data cache. Also, the 030 can operate at higher clock speeds and support burst transfers from memory.
If 68K AROS ever gets fast enough for practical use with the 030 then I would be happy to use it on my Amiga's. :)