Roadshow for 68K -Needs your support!

[warpdesign]

and I never got the kind of feedback for it which I would have gotten if Roadshow had been properly released.

Does this mean you didn't get the expected feedback from OS4 Roadshow version ?

[frakswe]

How is running a router and an OS4.1 computer more energy efficient than just running an OS4.1 computer?

it isn't...you would have to run os4.1 as a router to for my thesis to work.

In my view there is no "server OS", that's just a term certain people invented in attempts to justify the shortcommings in their beloved system. Once you have a machine online, noone cares if the OS you're running is "server os" or not, it's what you do with it that matters, and shuffling around traffic as a router or bridge does not even sort under "server" activities.

well calling it server os or not is quicker to type, yes?

[Gerbinist]

I'm game.

[Karlos]

How is running a router and an OS4.1 computer more energy efficient than just running an OS4.1 computer?

When your ADSL modem is built into your router, you don't really have much alternative. Besides, most people have more than one networked device. Who would want to run a full computer to service them all when a compact little router does the job for a few watts of power?

[Trev]

Most if not all broadband modems can be configured to operate as bridges. That's what I've always done. All moden SOHO routers support PPPoE, physical address spoofing, and all the other bits you need to work around your ISP's inane access policies. If your ISP is relying on your default use of their equipment and attempting to "manage" your service at the end point, well, they're being silly, especially if you own the equipment.

@olsen

I'd pay for it, in part as a thank you for all the help you provide re: other Amiga madness in your spare time.

Re: 68060, if the stack spends a relatively high amount of time computing checksums, a pipeline optimized checksum would be great. That same routine should run on other CPUs without issues, albeit linearly, yes?

[kolla]

When your ADSL modem is built into your router, you don't really have much alternative. Besides, most people have more than one networked device. Who would want to run a full computer to service them all when a compact little router does the job for a few watts of power?

This is getting totally side tracked, but some points...
* not every Amiga in the world is connected via ADSL (sheesh)
* many m68k Amiga systems do not have ethernet
* many m68k Amiga systems have alternatives, floppy link, ARCNet, parnet etc.
* to get those online, you typically end up using an Amiga with ethernet as a router or bridge between the various oddball links - a typical "standalone router" will not suffice.
* routing traffic is not "serving", it's something any half decent IP stack is supposed to be capable of.

[Karlos]

* not every Amiga in the world is connected via ADSL (sheesh)

I guess I'm one of the lucky ones

All my "used more than once in a blue moon" Amigas have a NIC in them. Only my not-working A600 is presently without one.

If I ever needed to use them all at once online though, I'd need an extra switch :lol:

[kolla]

I guess I'm one of the lucky ones

Heh, that's funny - I meant it the other way around, not all Amiga users are unlucky enough to have to suffer from the misbehaviour that ADSL causes :lol:

[Jeff]

@Olsen

I remember an article written during or near the end of Roadshow 68K development years ago. It was well written and spoke of how development process started with looking at the only available examples (AmiTCP sources?)

Do you remember the article?  Perhaps you wrote it. It was a good read, I should have saved it. I remember emailing the author at the time about purchasing Roadshow 68K.  I think it was released as part of a monthly Amiga.com update or something available for club members to read.  Do you still have it?

[Karlos]

Heh, that's funny - I meant it the other way around, not all Amiga users are unlucky enough to have to suffer from the misbehaviour that ADSL causes :lol:

Well, AmiTCP on the classic machines and Roadshow on the OS4 box never gave me any problems with my router. It's true that AmiTCP doesn't do DHCP, but all I did was to reserve IP addresses for all the devices that are permanently on the network that the classics might have to talk to and leave anything transient to get whatever address DHCP wants to give it out of what's left.

[mousehouse]

If there is a half-decent Amiga IP stack for sale, I'm in...

No GUI is no issue IMHO... if configuration is done using a command in startup-sequence and one or two config files in a logical manner (eg. like FreeBSD or Redhat) it's much more straightforward that a badly created GUI. Genesis is still driving me crazy

[olsen]

I don't think there is much of a need, since amiga people are blatantly ignorant about the entire networking thing. Till the day their oh so beloved supermodern browser, be it OWB or TimberWolf, stops working that is. I'm just saying that I don't see much point in Roadshow either at this point, what does it bring to the table that one cannot do already with old AmiTCP?

I personally thought it was less of a headache to set up, and it has a couple of features which other TCP/IP stacks, owing to their age, could not bring to the table. Roadshow was the kind of software I needed myself, as I was dissatisfied with the existing offerings. Building the thing also was an interesting experience. I was curious how an Amiga TCP/IP stack worked, and watching it get faster as the code improved was rewarding all by itself.

Is it really that much better? What features are there? Will you continue to develop it, like some people here seem to think? If so, what is the road.. heh.. map?

Nothing is ever certain. I'm not going to walk away from Roadshow, and how it evolves depends upon the user feedback. If you don't know what it takes to make a better product, it probably won't become one.

In my view Hyperion are fools to think they can continue to maintain an IP stack in-house, they also have plenty of other things to worry about, like USB stack and whatnot.

Gee, you seem to have the wrong idea how OS4 is developed. While Hyperion has in-house developers working on the product, at least half of the work being done on the whole package is contributed by third party developers.

Indeed, where is the fun in that - let me rephrase the question - how much would it cost to buy out Roadshow from whoever own it, Hyperion I presume?

I own it alright. It's just that I am contractually restricted from doing with it whatever might strike my fancy. There are limits to what I can do.

What, OS4 users don't offer good enough feedback? Shocking! :roflmao:

More people can run 68k software than can run OS4. Even if each member of each groups (or sets; one being a superset of the other) were to come up with one bug report and one enhancement request each, the amount of feedback to come from OS4 users would still be very small by comparison.

[olsen]

Speaking of Amiga market wouldnt it be better create bounty to release RoadShow/68k binaries for free? No need to worry about piracy, shipping costs, CD duplication or wondering if there will be enough buyers.

Once it's free, who is going to take care of it? For free? This won't be as much fun as having some sort of carrot providing an incentive to keep pulling the cart.

[olsen]

Does this mean you didn't get the expected feedback from OS4 Roadshow version ?

I probably got just the amount of feedback to be expected. Since the number of OS4 users is smaller than the total number of users who can and would run a 68k TCP/IP stack, I did not receive as much feedback as I could have gotten.

[olsen]

Re: 68060, if the stack spends a relatively high amount of time computing checksums, a pipeline optimized checksum would be great. That same routine should run on other CPUs without issues, albeit linearly, yes?

The IP checksum calculation and verification function already is highly optimized and written in 68k assembly language (I borrowed it from NetBSD). But due to how the algorithm works, it's hard to avoid pipeline stalls altogether. It comes down to fetching one word at a time, adding it to the accumulator and checking for carry.

While the checksumming code certainly contributes to the performance, speed comes from how fast you can move data to/from the network I/O requests into/out of the TCP/IP stack's internal data structures. I'm lucky to have found one of the fastest copying routines to do this job.

[olsen]

@Olsen

I remember an article written during or near the end of Roadshow 68K development years ago. It was well written and spoke of how development process started with looking at the only available examples (AmiTCP sources?)

Do you remember the article?  Perhaps you wrote it.

It's likely that I did. I also wrote the article about the FastFileSystem reimplementation I was was responsible for.

It was a good read, I should have saved it. I remember emailing the author at the time about purchasing Roadshow 68K.  I think it was released as part of a monthly Amiga.com update or something available for club members to read.  Do you still have it?

I'd have to dig. While I never throw stuff away, it's sometimes an issue to figure out where it ended up. Currently, all my old data sits on a NAS system at home. But once you've gone beyond 28 GBytes of Amiga-related data that have accumulated over some 25 years, it becomes difficult to locate anything...