How to stress test a 68030?

[guest7146]

Hi everyone,

One of my Blizzard 68030 cards seems to be a little bit dodgy, so I have set up a basic A1200 motherboard on my bench with the 68030 card connected to see if I can find out what's going on.  I've connected a floppy drive to the motherboard, booted into workbench 2.04, and I've left the clock running from 0:00 so that I can see if/when the system crashes (it's been known to freeze and hang when connected to my desktop Amiga).

So far it's been running for 5 hours without problem.  Damn.  Perhaps the card isn't at fault after all!

But, I've decided that I'd like to run the system for a bit longer with some CPU intensive tasks.  I only have the basic floppy-based Workbench 2.04 system at my disposal, so I was wondering if any of you lot could think of anything I could get the system to do that would give the CPU a good workout? Is there any command I can give the Amiga through DOS that would sent it on a pointless and fruitless exercise for a few hours or something?

Suggestions welcome!

Thanks,

AH.

[faki]

http://ftp://ftp.distributed.net/pub/dcti/current-client/dnetc-amigaos-68k.lha

[amigakit]

A good way of stress testing it is to run it through AIBB's complete set of modules for at least 3 full cycles continously.

[guest7146]

Thanks for the replies both.

Unfortunately the test setup I've constructed is very bare bones - it's literally just a known good A1200 motherboard, an old floppy drive and a copy of Workbench 2.04 I found laying around.

The suggestions you've offered will involve a little bit more work in terms of the setup to get it into a position where I can get external programs onto it etc.  No problem, I can do that, but I was just asking in case anyone was able to say "hey, if you write yourself this quick DOS script and run it the CPU will go off and execute the instructions repeatedly and indefinitely."

I suppose I could write my own program to do that, if only I had a compiler or an assembler available to me.

Anyway, it looks like I'll have to invest a bit more time in the test setup then.

Cheers both,

AH.

[Crom00]

Just got a Blizz and it was acting gofy, crashes here and there would be ok if I just left the machine on but if I ran apps it'd go wild and crash and give me gurus.... so I swapped the ram and it works.

[amigakit]

You dont need a complicated setup, just download AIBB to a bootable blank floppy disk and run it:

http://www.aminet.net/util/moni/AIBB_65.lha

[guest7146]

Just got a Blizz and it was acting gofy, crashes here and there would be ok if I just left the machine on but if I ran apps it'd go wild and crash and give me gurus.... so I swapped the ram and it works.

Yeah, that makes sense.  A RAM problem will easily trash the stack causing a non-recoverable crash.  That may in fact be the problem with mine, I haven't tried changing the RAM yet.

You dont need a complicated setup, just download AIBB to a bootable blank floppy disk and run it:

Yeah the only trouble is getting it on to the bare bones Amiga.  My main Amiga is down at the moment, though it's only the PPC card so I suppose I could stick my 68030 in that (I have another known-good blizz 68030 in my mint condition desktop A1200), get the system running, download the program onto a floppy, and then we're good to go.

Alternatively if I can find a version of cross dos on an Amiga floppy somewhere I can use my PC to get the file.  I probably have got that somewhere, it's just a case of finding it.

This is what I meant by "a little more work".  A job for tomorrow, I think!



Cheers all,

AH.

[stefcep2]

why are you running 2.04 when you (would)  have kickstart 3.0 at least?

[guest7146]

Because I had a 2.04 floppy disk immediately available to me, where as my 3.0 disks are stored away somewhere.  I haven't had a requirement to boot from one of these disks for a long time.  I only wanted it for a quick experiment so 2.04 would do.
 
AH.

[TCMSLP]

My first suggestion would be a loop of creating an LHA (archive) from files held in RAM: but without any means to get lha to the amiga ... I guess that's not a possibility.

Could you write a basic shell script to repetatively copy files in RAM:?  Or - can you loop basic mathematics from the command line?  I'm not sure what capabilities the CLI has ...

Also, I'm curious what heat difference there is under load for a 68030 CPU.  How does the Amiga kernel 'idle'?   Would doing useful work stress the CPU any more than the thing being sat in some sort of amiga kernel idle loop?

[Franko]

This example may be a wee bit too extreme.... :rolleyes: