Roadshow for 68K -Needs your support!

[Vulture]

Great results on pcmcia! I get those speeds (and often lower) on my A1200 w 060@80 via MiamiDX!

[Karlos]

PCMCIA NE2000 card with cnet.device 1.9, Roadshow 4.294, A1200HD (14 MHz 68EC020; 4 MBytes of fast memory)
480 KByte/s

Wow, that's at least 30% faster than my PCMCIA NIC with a 68040 / AmiTCP

[mechy]

I can say i am not surprised by the results at the end on the 2 stock machines. both using 16bit pcmcia interface. I am sure that accelerating them would make quite a difference.
the 600 going to chip is well, definately expected.. LOL
nice list of results here Olaf!

Was the ariadne II you have fixed to run full duplex? i recall back in the day contacting villagetronic about this on mine.Seems there were bugs with some thatcould use a hardware fix?


mike

[magnetic]

Olsen
Thanks for the speed comparisons very interesting and good illustration of Roadshow speed. Can i ask you again why it is that you decide to release this NOW instead of back in 2003 when everyone was trying to get you to? Before the last of the amigans jumped ship?

[olsen]

@Olaf

Very nice results. I see that an EAB topic is a bit more technical I wonder how many KB/s i can get using my 3com pcmcia lan card.

btw. How about making a new driver specification (SANA3) for all amigalike systems?.

The word is "difficult", not just "challenging".

Morphos and OS4 have already drivers for 1 gbit NICs so i it could be useful.

I do not know about MorphOS, but OS4 uses the SANA-II driver architecture, and it has no support for DMA-assisted network data transfer which severely hampers its performance with gigabit NICs. This is still an unsolved problem, due to the state of the SANA-II standardization.

[olsen]

Great results on pcmcia! I get those speeds (and often lower) on my A1200 w 060@80 via MiamiDX!

Do you get these speeds with a PCMCIA networking interface, or do you use something else?

[olsen]

Wow, that's at least 30% faster than my PCMCIA NIC with a 68040 / AmiTCP

Hm... I had no idea how far the performance range actually goes. So this is better than I could hope to expect.

It also suggests that the actual performance of the CPU is less of a factor here. I suspect that the PCMCIA interface may be what is limiting overall performance in this area.

[olsen]

Was the ariadne II you have fixed to run full duplex?

I have no idea. The test setup I ran back then (in 2003; these are older test figures) probably did not benefit from full duplex operations. The tests exercised data reception, in the LAN, over a prolonged period of time: the Amiga received data, the ftp server on the other end of the connection just pumped it to the Amiga. In this scenario the receiver just sends ACK responses for every few KBytes of data received correctly. There is not enough I/O overlap to make full duplex operations contribute significant performance improvements over a half duplex card, such as the Ariadne I. As you may see among the performance figures I posted, the Ariadne I did significantly better than the Ariadne II.

i recall back in the day contacting villagetronic about this on mine.Seems there were bugs with some thatcould use a hardware fix?

I also remember that the hardware had issues with the full duplex operations, and that this was not something that could be corrected just in software.

[olsen]

Olsen
Thanks for the speed comparisons very interesting and good illustration of Roadshow speed. Can i ask you again why it is that you decide to release this NOW instead of back in 2003 when everyone was trying to get you to? Before the last of the amigans jumped ship?

The short answer is: because I burnt out. I was originally trying to get Roadshow released with the publisher providing a GUI, and me contributing the TCP/IP stack, the drivers, tools, SDK, etc. The first attempt collapsed as the Amiga market collapsed. The second attempt stalled until it became really painful to continue. The third attempt collapsed because I was, as I now see it in retrospect, burn out already.

I blame myself for trying too hard to do too much for a long time. It wasn't just that I was trying to get Roadshow off the ground, I also juggled university, my own company, the OS4 development work and a handful of other things that needed attention. This will go down well (for some definitions of "well") as long as your energy and constitution permit, but you're actually living on borrowed time, so to speak.

So, all of this had to come to a stop at some point. And I've just crawled out of from whatever stone I was hiding under to see if there was still enough fun left in me and the Amiga community for another round of doing what I believe I do best...

[omgas]

Hello,

@olsen

for your question about ideas for setting up support, for me personally
having a user2user mailinglist would be just fine. Perhaps the web
Google Groups service could be used. Maybe someone here knows
if it is possible to use this in a moderated mode, and if
this suits the intended use at all.

Thankyou for the speed tests on base hardware. Networking easily wins
over sneakernet for moving larger files, and convenience often wins
over any speed limitations there might be.

Also I cant wait to try your stack on my A1000/68010 A590/acard/CF/2MB
RX500/1MB Zorro/A2065 setup. Here a GUI-less stack with a relatively
low memory footprint would be very useful.

Btw, for those having a network interface on many systems, and wanting
to run more than one system at the same time, perhaps you could share
your thoughts on this? I feel that complicated license terms tends to
put people off, personally however, I would not mind having some kind
of site license option.

I hope that you decide for a relaxed release,


Best Regards

omgas

[olsen]

Hello,

@olsen

for your question about ideas for setting up support, for me personally
having a user2user mailinglist would be just fine. Perhaps the web
Google Groups service could be used. Maybe someone here knows
if it is possible to use this in a moderated mode, and if
this suits the intended use at all.

A searchable archive of notes would be nice to have, and probably a Wiki, too. I'm still looking at the options, and the cost involved. If this turns out to be affordable, it won't affect the price of the stack, I hope. Now that everybody seems to suggest that going beyond 25€ would not be a good idea, this is probably what the upper end of the scale must look like.

Thankyou for the speed tests on base hardware. Networking easily wins
over sneakernet for moving larger files, and convenience often wins
over any speed limitations there might be.

I was asked, over at eab.abime.net, how today's most commonly used configurations would fare, and I promised to look into providing the figures by this weekend. This turned out to be an interesting exercise all by itself, before I even managed to run the tests. Looking for the NIC, the power supply, the mouse, the video cable, etc. I discovered stuff I thought I had lost years ago, and I also found and fixed two bugs in Roadshow and the PPP drivers as well.

Also I cant wait to try your stack on my A1000/68010 A590/acard/CF/2MB
RX500/1MB Zorro/A2065 setup. Here a GUI-less stack with a relatively
low memory footprint would be very useful.

Roadshow works surprisingly well on a configuration like that. The hardest part of testing on the A600 was in sitting down, cross-legged, in front of the TV and typing on that tiny keyboard. My back still aches, just thinking back to it.

Btw, for those having a network interface on many systems, and wanting
to run more than one system at the same time, perhaps you could share
your thoughts on this? I feel that complicated license terms tends to
put people off, personally however, I would not mind having some kind
of site license option.

The original plan was to let you install and use your copy of Roadshow on up to two machines without your conscience bothering you. If you wanted to use it on more than this number of machines, then, scout's honour, you should have chipped in for another copy of the package.

[Vulture]

Do you get these speeds with a PCMCIA networking interface, or do you use something else?

Yes, with a 3com ethernet card. I think pcmcia is not the limit though as it can reach about 2mb/sec at max, at least that's the speed with a squirrel scsi so the interface itself has more throughput capacity than what's achieved via Miami or AmiTCP.

[Tahoe]

@olson:
Actually your question regarding interest is a god's send at this point in time. Seeing I have about 15 to 20 ethernet equipped Amiga's standing around I have recently been looking for a nice TCP/IP solution. AmiTCP is either a dog to configure, slow and outdated or a more recent version simply not available after the H&P OS3.9 debacle.
Miami is no longer available, I would have loved to buy a proper keyfile for it, it's just not possible. That leaves no other really viable and available option.

So, in that regard, yes!! Please do release a 68K version, specially now that you've shown the speed increase possible on a classic machine I would most certainly pay for a valid license!

Thanx for your support for the classic machine, I extend that gratitude to all coders still active on the classic platform, if it wasn't for you all computing on this wonderful machine would be a lot less enjoyable!

[kolla]

Just want to toss in some numbers from a slightly different world, using wget to download a 88,616,960 bytes file from a webserver on same LAN, over IPv6 (for what it's worth), to /dev/null - all machines running Linux 2.6.30:

A1200, Blizzard 1230IV 50MHz 68030, Micronik-ZII, A2065: 169 s, ~512 KB/s
A1200, Blizzard 1260, 50MHz 68060, N2000 PCMCIA: 95s, ~910 KB/s
Macintosh Quadra 610, 25MHz 68040: 94s, ~920 KB/sec

[magnetic]

Olsen

thanks for your response. I understand what you mean by burnt out. After my time with Genesi I couldnt even turn on my peg...  glad you are back. Enjoy the amiga community its still alive!

[wawrzon]

@tahoe: looks like u will need to buy 20 keyfiles..