Amiga multi-tasking....Can't do anything else when copying files...

[stefcep2]

From memory you are using a compact flash card on the A1200 internal IDE bus?  Reading data from the compact flash card is VERY fast.  Writing to compact flash on your set up is VERY slow.  I think this is just the way compact flash works and also due to the IDE bus on the A1200 that locks up the CPU when writing.  I found that my original 40 meg hard drive writes faster than my compact flash!!!

[kolla]

alexh wrote:
As has already been said it's totally normal. File operations are blocking in AmigaOS.

That's slightly inaccurate, they are not blocking in AmigaOS, only in (old) Workbench.

I remember first seeing non blocking file I/O (on the Amiga) for WB alternative "Scalos" and thinking, way cool!

And in DirectoryOpus5 you can even copy from multiple sources to multiple destinations simultaniously.

If you do not have a DMA capable SCSI card then it probably isn't worth looking into as the CPU will be performing the File I/O?

Ofcourse it's still worth it, you can set the CPU priority used for the copy operation and do other operations in Workbench as normal.

[kolla]

ncafferkey wrote:

Piru wrote:
BTW. Is 3.9 AsyncWB really stable? I remember talk of some nasty bugs in it.

Yes, I remember having problems with it, but I can't remember the details. One quirky bug that I made a note of at the time was that if you tried to copy a hard link to another volume, it attempted to create a hard link spanning the volumes. But I think there might have been worse bugs too.

Speaking of hard links - how do I know that a file is a hard link in the first place? Neither workbench nor c:List is able to tell them apart. Not softlinks either for that matter.

[Piru]

@kolla

how do I know that a file is a hard link in the first place?

AmigaOS API is a bit screwed here.

The only dos.library level solution is to ExNext/ExAll the parent directory.

For softlinks you can also ACTION_LOCATE_OBJECT the specific name. If you get an error and Result2 is ERROR_IS_SOFT_LINK then it is a softlink. If the packet succeeds you must free the lock with ACTION_FREE_LOCK.

As for the dir and list commands, they just don't support links.

[kolla]

Piru wrote:
@kolla

how do I know that a file is a hard link in the first place?

AmigaOS API is a bit screwed here.

The only dos.library level solution is to ExNext/ExAll the parent directory.

For softlinks you can also ACTION_LOCATE_OBJECT the specific name. If you get an error and Result2 is ERROR_IS_SOFT_LINK then it is a softlink. If the packet succeeds you must free the lock with ACTION_FREE_LOCK.

As for the dir and list commands, they just don't support links.

Exactly, it seems very "half done".

The only thing I ever use linking for is a "makelink ram:Disk.info envarc:ram_disk.info soft" in s:user-startup, so that I can snapshot icon etc. as normal :-)

[platon42]

kolla wrote:

The only thing I ever use linking for is a "makelink ram:Disk.info envarc:ram_disk.info soft" in s:user-startup, so that I can snapshot icon etc. as normal :-)

I sometimes use hard links for saving disk space, e.g. for Poseidon installer disks (either in flashrom or on DD-disk) if there's the same icon multiple times (drawer or installer icons), I would hardlink the .info files to one "template". This would save me a few kilobytes of diskspace :-)

Other than that, hardlinks should probably be avoided at all costs, the chances that the filesystem supports them correctly is slim and they cause all kinds of troubles for most file managers.