Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 6:48 PM Felix Miata  wrote:
> dmccunney composed on 2021-03-11 17:43 (UTC-0500):
>
> > The RAM here is all DDR4, same speed, and the only difference is one
> > stick is 8GB.  (I may add another 8GB sick at some point, but it won't
> > be soon.)
>
> > When I said I *saw* no performance difference I meant exactly that.
>
> > I have a simple attitude about stuff like this: if I cannot*perceive*
> > the difference in normal use, I don't *care*. I have better things to
> > do with the time than spend it running MEMTEST to detect a
>> performance difference I won't *notice* in use.

> > I appreciate your concern, but the only reason I ever ran MEMTEST was
> > if I had a memory fault, and the last time was years back..
>
> As fast as DDR4 is, I don't imagine many people can perceive the difference,
> especially running text DOS apps. That's why there are tools to measure with. 
> If
> you don't want to know that's fine and dandy. As the old saying goes, 
> ignorance is
> bliss.

I have no reason to *need* to know, which is better still.

I run a few text DOS apps, using DOSBox or vDOS Plus on my Win10
machine. But they are used occasionally.  Most usage is Win64 GUI
apps.  The most used program is my browser, and the production browser
is the current Firefox Quantum release.  (I also have current Firefox
DEveloper Edition and Firefox Nightly versions, mostly to track
development.  I also have current versions of MS Edge and Chrome.  If
I am awake and at the machine, I am usually in Firefox.

Another large application is Calibre, an open source, cross platform
application written in Pyhon, which I use to manage a large eBook
library.

I have other things like an old version of MS Office (but the only
part of that I use is Publisher to do DTP), Libre Offce, and some
other things, but they get run infrequently.

I don't compile large applications from a source tree, or do heavy
image editing in Photoshop, or video editing, and I'm not a gamer who
has a video card (or more than one) faster than my CPU..

What I am trying to imagine is what I might do on the machine where I
would actually *notice* the difference you think might be caused by
the RAM stick size mismatch.

> The first selection in my boot menus is MemTest86. I swap stuff around a lot.
> There's no fun in swapping parts if results can't be measured.

Fair enough.  I got cured of building my own PC from parts.  Current
off the shelf systems are good enough and fast enough that I don't
need to build my own to get performance.

That sort of thing is the reason why I went with Ubuntu as my Linux
distro when I was dual booting.  It did the best job I've seen in a
distro of figuring out what hardware it was being installed in,
configuring itself, and Just Working. I wanted to spend the time
*using* the system, not hacking to *make* it usable.

> Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/
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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Felix Miata]

dmccunney composed on 2021-03-11 17:43 (UTC-0500):

> The RAM here is all DDR4, same speed, and the only difference is one
> stick is 8GB.  (I may add another 8GB sick at some point, but it won't
> be soon.)

> When I said I *saw* no performance difference I meant exactly that.

> I have a simple attitude about stuff like this: if I cannot*perceive*
> the difference in normal use, I don\t *care*. I have better things to
> do with the time than spend it running MEMTEST to detect a performance
> difference I won't *notice* in use.

> My needs are modest, I don't push the envelope on my system, and what
> I have is actually overkill for what I  do. My concern is a stable
> system that Just Works, and I have one.

> I appreciate your concern, but the only reason I ever ran MEMTEST was
> if I had a memory fault, and the last time was years back.. 

As fast as DDR4 is, I don't imagine many people can perceive the difference,
especially running text DOS apps. That's why there are tools to measure with. If
you don't want to know that's fine and dandy. As the old saying goes, ignorance 
is
bliss.

The first selection in my boot menus is MemTest86. I swap stuff around a lot.
There's no fun in swapping parts if results can't be measured.
-- 
Evolution as taught in public schools, like religion,
is based on faith, not on science.

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/


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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 5:05 PM Felix Miata  wrote:
> dmccunney composed on 2021-03-11 09:51 (UTC-0500):
>
> >> IME when RAM is not used in matched pairs in correct slots in a dual 
> >> channel
> >> board, RAM speed (memtest86) is cut by nearly half. Did you test RAM speed 
> >> before
> >> and after the change?
>
> > No.  I simply made sure I had RAM that matched the specs of the other
> > sticks.  The only difference was that one stick is 8GB instead of
> > four. I was *not* using RAM of different speeds, and no mismatch was
> > involved..
>
> > I saw *no* negative performance impact, and would have been startled if I 
> > did.
>
> By not matching size of pairs, you disable dual channel. You should run 
> memtest86
> with and without the 4G and 8G sticks to see the difference in print on your 
> screen.

NO.

The RAM here is all DDR4, same speed, and the only difference is one
stick is 8GB.  (I may add another 8GB sick at some point, but it won't
be soon.)

When I said I *saw* no performance difference I meant exactly that.

I have a simple attitude about stuff like this: if I cannot*perceive*
the difference in normal use, I don\t *care*. I have better things to
do with the time than spend it running MEMTEST to detect a performance
difference I won't *notice* in use.

My needs are modest, I don't push the envelope on my system, and what
I have is actually overkill for what I  do. My concern is a stable
system that Just Works, and I have one.

I appreciate your concern, but the only reason I ever ran MEMTEST was
if I had a memory fault, and the last time was years back..

> Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/
__
Dennis


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Re: [Freedos-user] [OT] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Aitor Santamaría]

Hi,

On Thu, 11 Mar 2021 at 16:03, dmccunney  wrote:

>
> > (What's more, in my personal belief, the second most alive intelligent
> species after Homo Sapiens is one of them).
> (And the African Grey parrot is likely the bird
> you are thinking of.)
>
Right.


> But while they may have evolved into birds, they are no longer dinosaurs.
>
Aren't they? :)
Well, they say that this is not a bird
Ichthyornis - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

But a modern goose is:
geese teeth - Bing images


Is there a frontier, or is it the mania of humans to put things in boxes?
This is a wave or a particle.
Windows95 is a seamless new operating system :)

Aitor
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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Felix Miata]

dmccunney composed on 2021-03-11 09:51 (UTC-0500):

> Felix Miata wrote:

>> Odds are that 32GB capable board features dual channel RAM.
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-channel_memory_architecture

> Possible.

>> IME when RAM is not used in matched pairs in correct slots in a dual channel
>> board, RAM speed (memtest86) is cut by nearly half. Did you test RAM speed 
>> before
>> and after the change?

> No.  I simply made sure I had RAM that matched the specs of the other
> sticks.  The only difference was that one stick is 8GB instead of
> four. I was *not* using RAM of different speeds, and no mismatch was
> involved..

> I saw *no* negative performance impact, and would have been startled if I did.

By not matching size of pairs, you disable dual channel. You should run 
memtest86
with and without the 4G and 8G sticks to see the difference in print on your 
screen.

A quick test here using MemTest86 V8.3 Free on:

CPU: AMD A10-7850K Radeon R7, 3.7Ghz
motherboard: ASUSTeK model: A88X-PRO
RAM: Mushkin DDR3-2133 XMP, 10-12-12-28, 2 sticks of 4GB each
matched pair RAM speed: 7474 MB/s dual channel
single stick RAM speed: 5943 MB/s not dual channel = 79.5%

CPU: Intel Pentium G4600, 3.6GHz
motherboard: ASUSTeK model: B85M-E
RAM: Crucial DDR4-2400, 17-17-17-39, 2 sticks of 8GB each
matched pair RAM speed: 21.67 GB/s dual channel
single stick RAM speed: 13.92 GB/s not dual channel = 64.2%
RAM: generic DDR4-2400, 17-17-17-39, 2 sticks of 8GB each
matched pair RAM speed: 19.92 GB/s dual channel
single stick RAM speed: 12.07 GB/s not dual channel = 60.6%

My recollection is with DDR2 the difference tended to be bigger, as low as 53% 
for
1 stick compared to dual channel.
-- 
Evolution as taught in public schools, like religion,
is based on faith, not on science.

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/


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Re: [Freedos-user] [OT] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 6:28 PM Aitor Santamaría  wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 at 23:57, Eric Auer  wrote:
>>
>> If you are interested in alive dragons, visit a Komodo Dragon.
>> Those lizards do have some dragon-like properties, but they are
>> not dinosaurs either - too "modern" species for that.

> Why wouldn't a dinosaur be modern?

Organisms live in environments.  Environments change.  The organism
either changes to adapt to the environment or becomes extinct.

> We live surrounded by some extant 10,000+ species of them which have adapted 
> very well to modern times. I see and hear them every day, as most of us folks 
> on this list.
> (What's more, in my personal belief, the second most alive intelligent 
> species after Homo Sapiens is one of them).

Referring to Stephen J. Gould's notion that dinosaurs were the
ancestors of  birds?  (And the African Grey parrot is likely the bird
you are thinking of.)

But while they may have evolved into birds, they are no longer dinosaurs.

For an example of something that has been around a very long time and
*not* really evolved, consider the cockroach.  They've been around
since the Carboniferous Era.  The only change was getting smaller.
(Carboniferous Era cockroaches could reach 2 feet in length.) The
environment they are adapted for has been present consistently, and
they are adapted for it, so no need to radically change.

> Aitor
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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 5:31 PM Felix Miata  wrote:
> dmccunney composed on 2021-03-10 16:56 (UTC-0500):
>
> >> dmccunney composed on 2021-03-09 17:35 (UTC-0500):
>
> >>> ...It has 20GB RAM
>
> >> What is that, a pair of 2GB and a pair of 8GB?
>
> > Nope.  It has four DRAM slots, and came with 16GB as four 4GB sticks
> > in those slots.  I replaced a 4GB stick with a 8GB stick to bring it
> > to 20.

> Odds are that 32GB capable board features dual channel RAM.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-channel_memory_architecture

Possible.

> IME when RAM is not used in matched pairs in correct slots in a dual channel
> board, RAM speed (memtest86) is cut by nearly half. Did you test RAM speed 
> before
> and after the change?

No.  I simply made sure I had RAM that matched the specs of the other
sticks.  The only difference was that one stick is 8GB instead of
four. I was *not* using RAM of different speeds, and no mismatch was
involved..

I saw *no* negative performance impact, and would have been startled if I did.

> Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/
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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter (was IDE <-> CF adapters)

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 at 17:51, dmccunney  wrote:
>
> I had a Unix machine at home before I got the XT clone.  I was Tech
> Support Manager for a small Unix systems house that resold AT kit
> when AT was in the computer business, and an AT 3B1 joined the
> family.
[...]

I have heard of the 3B1, 3B2 etc., but never actually seen hardware.
The anti-monopoly breakup of "Ma Bell" was about the time I entered
secondary school. Over in the British Isles, AT were a very minor,
little-known foreign company with no real influence and I am not sure
that they sold hardware at all.

The European computer industry very much went its own way in the 1980s
and American companies were just one among many vendors. Commodore and
Atari were significant, but Tandy (Radio Shack) were not. I never was
a TRS-anything outside of shop display units in Tandy stores. I think
they were just too expensive. Similarly I read articles praising Apple
for the first sub-US$1000 home computer, but since that was twice the
price of a used car, they were way too expensive for the UK market and
I don't think I personally knew anyone with an Apple home computer.
Sinclair Research with its sub-GB£100 home computers made the splash
here. These machines were affordable to ordinary families, costing
just a month or two of disposable income. Apple computers cost most of
a year's disposable income.

>  As of DOS 2.X,
> MS adopted a hierarchical file system, tree structured directories,
> I/O redirection and other Unix concepts, but implemented thyem very
> differently.)

True. MS did have a dual-OS strategy at one point: Xenix for the high
end, DOS for the low end, but it never panned out. There's a lot of
disinformation about why they picked the forward slash for switches
and the backslash for directories. The truth is that it was from DEC
TOPS-10 and nothing to do with CP/M.

http://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-backslash-as-path-separator/

> After looking at an assortment of freeware and shareware versions of
> Unix commands, I bought a commercial package called the MKS Toolkit.
[...]

Heard of it. Never saw it. I work for a Linux vendor, and I've been
using xNix since 1988 and SCO Xenix 286, but I've never been a fan of
xNix. Mainly because I am not a programmer and I never liked C.

Did you ever look at Coherent? For the time it was the most impressive
xNix for PC-compatibles. It's open source now.

> [...]  When I was booted into the Korn
> shell, you had to dig a bit to discover you *weren't* on an Honest-to
> $DEITY Unix machine. (And I was able to craft an equivalent of the
> Unix lp print spooler using the DOS print command and Korn shell
> scripts and aliases.)

Very impressive!

> Right. You were in the UK.  I'm aware of the stuff you ran, but never
> have a chance to play with it here.

Yup. It goes both ways. PCs never caught on over here until Amstrad
made the first affordable clones -- the PC 1512 and PC 1640. These
were about 1986 or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC1512

They were something like ¼ of the price of American clones such as
Compaq, which meant that these were expensive business computers.
Amstrads were just about affordable as quite expensive home computers.
My  Archimedes came out a year later and was so much faster than an
Amstrad that it could run a PC Emulator entirely in software and still
give usable performance. I ran tools like QuickBASIC on mine, and did
real work on it. It had about the performance of a 2-3MHz 8088, but
with a *very* fast hard disk (as the Acorn OS was caching it
underneath).

So a 1987 Acorn was in the region of 20-30× faster than a 1986 PC
clone. And yet Acorn failed and the PC thrived. It's all about the
apps and always was.

Acorn's CPU, the ARM, is of course now the best-selling CPU in the
world, the basis of the new "Apple Silicon" Macs and Microsoft is
still trying to get Windows to run *well* on it.

> Er, the OS might actually reside on ROM chips, but I assume there was
> at least some RAM usage when calling OS functions. The OS might be in
> ROM, but OS routines would need scratch space in RAM.

Oh, yes, absolutely. But it meant that a 1MB machine was entirely
usable and you got _most_ of that meg for your own apps. You could
even have a RAMdisk in part of that 1MB and still have a usable amount
of space.

> (And the DR DOS variant of DOS originated from requests by Digital
> Research customers for a ROMmable DOS.  MS had not seperated code
> space and data space, so MSDOS c0uld not be put in ROM. DR DOS could.)

I did not know that! I knew it was ROMmable but not that this was the
genesis of DR DOS. Thanks!

> I have OS/2 here, but never got to install it on anything. OS/2 was
> technically superior to Win3.1, and could still be found in kiosk
> applications not that long back.  I had OS/2 Warp on a specialized
> telephony server at an employer.  It was a black box.  It just ran.
> If it hung, reboot it.  I never had to dig into OS/2 itself.

It was and is 

Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter (was IDE <-> CF adapters)

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 11 Mar 2021 at 00:32, dmccunney  wrote:
>
> On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 5:07 PM Jon Brase  wrote:
> > On 3/9/21 4:35 PM, dmccunney wrote:
> > > As a general rule, consumer machines are I/O bound, not compute bound.
> > > The CPU spends most of its time in an idle loop waiting for stuff to
> > > be read from/written to disk.
> >
> > Actually, as a general rule, on a consumer machine, both the CPU and the
> > disk spend most of their time waiting for user input to give them
> > something to do. Disk waits are nothing compared to the eternity between
> > the keystrokes of a fast typist, and that's if the user is neither away
> > nor lost in thought.
>
> I can't agree. We are not in the single-user, single tasking DOS days
> when one thing was going on at a time.

Agreed.

Way back in the mid-1990s I ran the testing labs for one of the UK's
largest computer magazines, PC Pro. (Known as "PC @uthority" in
Australia.) I organized a labs test of PCs with Win NT 4. This really
showed which manufacturers knew their stuff.

In the Pentium 1 era, Intel really advanced the art of motherboard
chipsets. Its old 82430 "Neptune" chipset for the 5V Pentium (60MHz &
66MHz) was very conventional. The 82430 FX "Triton" chipset for the
3.3V Pentium (75/90/100/120/133MHz) was a revelation. Its EIDE
controller, the PIIX chip, could do busmastering I/O, allowing the
disk drives to use DMA to put data into RAM. A device driver was
supplied on floppy.

On Win9x this made little difference because its limited kernel could
not overlap I/O. But on NT, even with 1 CPU, it was very different.

Without the busmastering driver, each disk access used programmed I/O.
NT booted as slowly as 9x.

With the driver, when NT booted, you could *hear* when the kernel
started executing. Disk access went from tick-tick-tick, tick-tick,
tick-tick-tick-tick, to bzt-bzzzt-bzzt-bzt. Once
the driver triggered, not only did disk access get quicker, but the
CPU could get on with something else while it occurred. So your PC
booted noticeably faster -- it took minutes off a long boot sequence
-- and you could continue to use the PC even under very heavy disk
load.

It's not just a question of the CPU sitting waiting any more, although
that's true, it does. But with a modern OS with a pre-emptive kernel,
it can queue up a bunch of I/O commands and then leave that particular
I/O subsystem to its own devices (literally!) and go off and do
something else while the subsystem does the work and puts the data
direct into RAM without CPU intervention.

Now that multicore CPUs are standard this is even more important. One
core can be doing a virus scan while another core is doing a
spellcheck and another core is servicing the UI so your PC still
responds to you.

To measure it, for example, one can set a program transcoding a video
file, which running standalone would take say 10min, and then run a
script that puts Photoshop through its paces for about 10min. On a
system without DMA I/O, with both tasks running, they will take on the
order of twice as long. With DMA I/O, a background task will only slow
the foreground task by a few %.

For me, as someone who used to do benchmarking for a living, this was
one of the biggest advances I ever saw in personal computing since the
1980s, and it went almost totally unnoticed in the industry as a whole
-- sadly a lot of folk writing about computing in the 21st century
lack training, scientific literacy, and a basic understanding of
statistics and ideas like a significant or insignificant difference.

I've seen websites making buying recommendations based on measuring
external sources' bar charts with a ruler, when they did not notice
that the Y axis did not begin at zero.

--
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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter (was IDE <-> CF adapters)

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 at 22:37, Jon Brase  wrote:

> Unfortunately, it's not working. OnTrack sees the same ultra-small capacity 
> for the drive as the BIOS and Linux see on that machine. It picks up the 
> other 40 GB 2.5" PATA drive, but the SSD + Adapter can't be extended from 
> what the BIOS sees to the actual size of the drive. I even tried a different 
> SSD on the adapter, and got almost the exact same crippled size (130 MB), so 
> I don't even get to test if Linux's offset parameter works, even OnTrack 
> isn't seeing the full drive size.
>
> My working theory at this point is that the adapter is detecting that it's 
> working wtih an old BIOS and "helpfully" setting up a temporary Host 
> Protected Area on the drive, after which it refuses to acknowledge that any 
> area after the 130 MB mark even exists until poweroff. I haven't been able to 
> boot an environment that has hdparm(8) available, so I haven't been able to 
> test this.

OK, I was alarmed by the mention of "SSD + adapter" so I went back and
reread the root message. (I can't go back 2 months because I only just
re-subbed to the list after a decade (!) away.)

But it's a SATA-to-PATA adapter? That introduces an extra layer of
complexity to the question. :-(

Also, IIUC, you are trying to access _existing_ partitions? No, I do
not think a disk manager will help you there. Disk managers bypass the
BIOS restrictions by remapping or translating disks' real values, but
they do not just fix the problem. Once you have a disk manager
installed, I think you will need to create _new_ partitions after
getting a DiskMgr working, using whatever translated scheme it
creates.

Therefore I would backup the data on the existing drive onto another
machine, perhaps a networked one;  zero the disks, or at least their
first 1kB or so, to erase any exiating partitions; try to create _new_
partitions with the DiskMgr's translation in effect; then copy the
data back. (If this includes a bootable OS, then e.g. boot from a
Linux live medium, CD or DVD or USB, and connect to the machine with
the backups over the network and use Linux to restore the data onto
the newly-repartitioned machine.

However, saying all that:

I do not see any info about what the host machine is. If it is new
enough to have PCI slots, then a SATA controller with a BIOS of its
own should, in theory, bypass all this nightmare. Citation with model
recommendations:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=62958

A firmware-equipped SATA controller (i.e. not some cheap thing that
just adds additional ports and is not bootable) will appear to the PC
as a SCSI controller and its firmware will take over the INT13 BIOS
calls for disk access completely.

If you do decide to go that route, though, I advise _against_ mixing
SATA and EIDE/PATA disks. Let the SATA controllers' firmware take over
completely and do not use the motherboard's EIDE channels at all.

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