Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[wilhelm . spiegl]

Hi Rugxulo, 

I am not sure if the issue can be closed. The problem from my side is:
Is "lh fdapm apmdos" too hard for the fd live CD? 

Would a more soft version of power saving be enough? 

Willi 

Am 2023-03-16 12:25, schrieb Rugxulo:

> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 4:26 AM Wilhelm Spiegl  
> wrote: 
> 
>> after several tests I found the reason for this strange behaviour.
>> It disappeared when I booted from a virtual diskette without fdconfig / 
>> fdauto.bat and executed watcom.exe. Same from HD.
>> Then I added fdconfig again - it was still fast.
>> Finally I found out that line (in about 62) caused be brake.
>> "lh fdapm apmdos"
>> This command appears three times in the autoexec.bat (lines 40, 62, 76, 
>> maybe it varies a little) and is used there depending on the machine types.
>> Putting the command "lh fdapm apmdos" to "rem" made the watcom.exe 
>> installation file work as it should.
>> 
>> I asked Eric Auer, he recommended tests without "lh" - or  replacing apmdos 
>> by the softer "fdapm ADV:REG" but this gave the same slow
>> speed I had before.
>> 
>> So I wonder if it is really necessary to install energy saving in FreeDOS 
>> live CD, or, at least to check where
>> the machine runs (bare metal or vm which needs more engergy at all).
> 
> IIRC, there's also a FDCONFIG setting of IDLEHALT which can already
> help somewhat. Outside of applications which constantly poll, it
> should reduce (virtual) cpu usage to less than maximum.
> 
> Anyways, I just now booted up old QEMU 6.1.0 (64-bit) atop dead Win7
> and used MetaDOS 0.7 (kernel 2041, 128 MB RAM, half of that is RAM
> drive) with old curl 7.64.1 to grab the relevant OW 2.0-c installer
> .EXE (which uses Causeway). Grabbing 140 MB with Curl took me five
> minutes. Installing a not-quite-full DOS toolset (roughly 33 MB) took
> two minutes. This was atop a virtual hard disk (FAT16) of 510 MB, no
> VT-X needed!
> 
> NASM 0.98.39 (16-bit) built and worked okay, so did MiniSed, so did
> p2c. What didn't work was compiling TinyAsm (for some unknown reason,
> probably a bug).
> 
> So I guess this issue can be closed. (Further testing results are
> still welcome.)
> 
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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

Just for completeness 

On Thu, Mar 9, 2023 at 4:22 PM Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> This is a self-extracting ZIP file. You can try using our
> build of infozip UNZIP to extract it. Maybe the downloaded
> exe uses build settings which are not fast for DOS or which
> expect more than 32 MB RAM. Maybe it even uses a swapfile?

It does use the Causeway extender, which indeed can swap. Unless they
changed something, the old behavior was to swap the ENTIRE amount of
used memory to disk (if needed), not just the extra part needed (a la
CWSDPMI). So 37 MB RAM usage (e.g. paq8o8z) on a 32 MB physical RAM
computer (my old Pentium) would swap all 37 MB (while CWSDPMI would
only swap 5 MB).

> I also expect that extracting 4000 files in DOS, some of
> the directories containing 100s of files (samples/clibexam,
> h/nt, binw, binnt, ...) to be slow without a decent cache
> and generally slow because our caches do not write-combine.
>
> If you had 500 MB RAM, you could extract to a RAMDISK ;-)

I always favored large RAM disks for MetaDOS. Heck, I also do that for
my bootable USB drive for increased speed (since flash is roughly 2x
slower to read and 5x slower to write). It's faster to do compilations
that way.

> You could test how long it takes to extract the files
> in Windows and then boot FreeDOS and use either COPY or
> XCOPY, with or without a cache, to copy it. I remember
> a thread where I suggested an XCOPY patch to pre-allocate
> all clusters before incrementally copying file contents,
> in order to avoid frequent incremental FAT updates, but
> I do not remember whether pre-compiled XCOPY binaries
> with this patch are available. It may improve speed :-)

IIRC, Doszip (Hjort) used your tip for faster copies:

* http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=8862#p8879

BTW, I've never seen any huge slowdowns in FreeDOS. This report was a
bit scary to me! But luckily it was (AFAIK) a false alarm.


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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 4:26 AM Wilhelm Spiegl  wrote:
>
> after several tests I found the reason for this strange behaviour.
> It disappeared when I booted from a virtual diskette without fdconfig / 
> fdauto.bat and executed watcom.exe. Same from HD.
> Then I added fdconfig again - it was still fast.
> Finally I found out that line (in about 62) caused be brake.
> "lh fdapm apmdos"
> This command appears three times in the autoexec.bat (lines 40, 62, 76, maybe 
> it varies a little) and is used there depending on the machine types.
> Putting the command "lh fdapm apmdos" to "rem" made the watcom.exe 
> installation file work as it should.
>
> I asked Eric Auer, he recommended tests without "lh" - or  replacing apmdos 
> by the softer "fdapm ADV:REG" but this gave the same slow
> speed I had before.
>
> So I wonder if it is really necessary to install energy saving in FreeDOS 
> live CD, or, at least to check where
> the machine runs (bare metal or vm which needs more engergy at all).

IIRC, there's also a FDCONFIG setting of IDLEHALT which can already
help somewhat. Outside of applications which constantly poll, it
should reduce (virtual) cpu usage to less than maximum.

Anyways, I just now booted up old QEMU 6.1.0 (64-bit) atop dead Win7
and used MetaDOS 0.7 (kernel 2041, 128 MB RAM, half of that is RAM
drive) with old curl 7.64.1 to grab the relevant OW 2.0-c installer
.EXE (which uses Causeway). Grabbing 140 MB with Curl took me five
minutes. Installing a not-quite-full DOS toolset (roughly 33 MB) took
two minutes. This was atop a virtual hard disk (FAT16) of 510 MB, no
VT-X needed!

NASM 0.98.39 (16-bit) built and worked okay, so did MiniSed, so did
p2c. What didn't work was compiling TinyAsm (for some unknown reason,
probably a bug).

So I guess this issue can be closed. (Further testing results are
still welcome.)


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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[Wilhelm Spiegl]

Hi all,

after several tests I found the reason for this strange behaviour.

It disappeared when I booted from a virtual diskette without fdconfig / fdauto.bat and executed watcom.exe. Same from HD.

Then I added fdconfig again - it was still fast.

Finally I found out that line (in about 62) caused be brake.

"lh fdapm apmdos"

This command appears three times in the autoexec.bat (lines 40, 62, 76, maybe it varies a little) and is used there depending on the machine types.

Putting the command "lh fdapm apmdos" to "rem" made the watcom.exe installation file work as it should.

 

I asked Eric Auer, he recommended tests without "lh" - or  replacing apmdos by the softer "fdapm ADV:REG" but this gave the same slow

speed I had before.

 

So I wonder if it is really necessary to install energy saving in FreeDOS live CD, or, at least to check where

the machine runs (bare metal or vm which needs more engergy at all).

 

Willi

 
 

Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2023 at 2:30 PM
From: wilhelm.spi...@mnet-online.de
To: "Technical discussion and questions for FreeDOS developers." 
Subject: Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS



I am no programmer, but I can test things like this for clarification:
I downloaded open-watcom-2_0-c-dos.exe (an extracting .exe) at:
https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2/releases/tag/Current-build
140 MB size.
First I extracted it with Windows, it contains 4,018 files, and has a size of
335 MB extracted (.exe extracted with 7zip). The extraction with Win needed
in about one minute (I assume less).

Installing FreeDOS and watcom 1.9 delivered with FreeDOS 2303 on virtualbox (installed with fdimples) needed in about one minute
for installation and in about one minute for deinstallation. Copying / deleting files from iso to virtual HD was extremely fast.

FreeDOS 2303 on 2 GB virtualbox vdi had 32 MB RAM, 1,738 GB free space.

I copied open watcom2 (see above) into the same 2GB vdi in virtualbox.
Installing open-watcom-2_0-c-dos.exe (140 MB) in virtualbox with FD 2303 really
needs much longer. But from my sight it is not astonishing as it has to extract
in about 4000 files from this .exe file. Needed time: 58 minutes, result: 4018 files, 335 MB

I increased the RAM to 256 MB (everything else unchanged). 20% of installation
were done in 10 minutes --> in about 50 minutes. stopped at 10 minutes.

Additionally I added "install=lbacache buf 20" in fdconfig.sys. (of course I checked if it was really installed!)

20% of installation were done in 10 minutes --> in about 50 minutes. stopped at 10 minutes.

At last I ran it from an MS product "7.1" on the same machine with a .vdi and a
.vhd image. The whole installation (4,018 files, 335 MB) was REALLY done in
three or four minutes.

No idea why FreeDOS is so slow with extraction, but it seems to be not the debt of the .exe file.

Willi

 


 
That depends.

whatever 'depends'.
 
Besides poorly optimized system caches, is the
installer doing things that blow the cache and increase the miss rate?

whatever the installer is doing: unless you find a valid 'this is
doing something in a stupid way' point this installer is as much a
valid benchmark point as any other. Possibly not the most relevant,
but still...

 
 You noted a significantly increased download zip.  Is everything
actually necessary?  Did you download a debug build that will have
additional binary code or is the download zip an optimized build?

in what way this is related to 'FreeDOS install speed is slow' escapes
me.

Tom



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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[Ladislav Lacina]

Very interresting - extremely slow installation through a instalator but 
quite a normal speed when copying cca 4000 files manualy.

...And this difference is not in MSDOS.




In theory - could it be explained by frequent calling the function
"GetFreeDiskSpace"? (Int21h/36h)


I have not seen the source of the installer and such algorithm would be not
very clever but what if

installer checks the free disk space before every single file copy?




And again - I have not seen the sources of FreeDOS kernel (nor the MSDOS 
kernel) but what if the MSDOS version is working quickly (using some caches)
and the FreeDOS version scans the filesystem in every call?

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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[wilhelm . spiegl]

Hi Eric, 

first I tried to install the exe within a 700 MB ramdrive created with
rdisk. 

Extracting it needed in about 47 minutes instead of 58 minutes. 

Then I zipped the folder with all 4.018 files with FD zip within a few
minutes (ca.4min). 

Then I run the FD unzip command over the original watcom.exe file and it
also needed only in about 4 minutes to extract everything (all files and
folders were extracted). But the installation routine for config /
autoexec is missing, so it is not the optimum. Additional comments see
below. 

> Hi Willi,
> 
>> I downloaded open-watcom-2_0-c-dos.exe (an extracting .exe) at:
>> https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2/releases/tag/Current-build
>> 140 MB size.
> 
> This is a self-extracting ZIP file. You can try using our
> build of infozip UNZIP to extract it. Maybe the downloaded
> exe uses build settings which are not fast for DOS or which
> expect more than 32 MB RAM. Maybe it even uses a swapfile? 
> 
> As reported I used 256 MB RAM at the end of my yesterday test. No real change 
> in speed. 
> Unzipping the watcom.exe file with FD unzip works fast.
> 
> I also expect that extracting 4000 files in DOS, some of
> the directories containing 100s of files (samples/clibexam,
> h/nt, binw, binnt, ...) to be slow without a decent cache
> and generally slow because our caches do not write-combine.
> 
> If you had 500 MB RAM, you could extract to a RAMDISK ;-) 
> 
> I did, see above. Result: yes, but not really fast.
> 
> I agree that it is frustrating when the self-extractor
> takes 58 minutes in FreeDOS and less than 1 in Windows,
> or less than 5 in the DOS 7.1 of Win95 or Win98. 
> 
> I only tried to reproduce a reported "bug" to confirm if the report is corret.
> 
> You say that when you added RAM or a cache, you saw circa
> 20% progress after 10 minutes, but I am not sure whether
> you aborted the experiments at that point or whether the
> extraction crashed at that point instead of completing in
> a total of 50 minutes? 
> 
> I had no fun to wait more 2 x in about 40 minutes, so I stopped 
> the test. No crash.
> 
> You could test how long it takes to extract the files
> in Windows and then boot FreeDOS and use either COPY or
> XCOPY, with or without a cache, to copy it. I remember
> a thread where I suggested an XCOPY patch to pre-allocate
> all clusters before incrementally copying file contents,
> in order to avoid frequent incremental FAT updates, but
> I do not remember whether pre-compiled XCOPY binaries
> with this patch are available. It may improve speed :-) 
> 
> Copying all 4000 extracted files from C: to ramdrive - or back - (with dn2) 
> worked in three or four minutes.
> 
> All 4000 files in the self-extracting ZIP use ZIP version
> 2 compatible DEFLATE compression, so the problem does NOT
> seem to be a too fancy compression, which would need more
> RAM or optimizations for newer CPU etc. I guess the REAL
> problem is FreeDOS being slow in file and metadata writes. 
> 
> I have no real idea if it is a read or write problem. I personally think it 
> may be a read problem with finding the position 
> 
> of the files to extract in such a big file (140 MB). Do you know a tool where 
> I can create a big .exe file working in DOS?
> 
> I am sure we have had threads about this before, even
> with people testing kernel patches to aid performance,
> maybe somebody remembers something specific about that?
> 
> Regards, Eric 
> 
> Cheers, Willi
> 
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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[Eric Auer]

Hi Willi,


I downloaded open-watcom-2_0-c-dos.exe (an extracting .exe) at:
https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2/releases/tag/Current-build
140 MB size.


This is a self-extracting ZIP file. You can try using our
build of infozip UNZIP to extract it. Maybe the downloaded
exe uses build settings which are not fast for DOS or which
expect more than 32 MB RAM. Maybe it even uses a swapfile?

I also expect that extracting 4000 files in DOS, some of
the directories containing 100s of files (samples/clibexam,
h/nt, binw, binnt, ...) to be slow without a decent cache
and generally slow because our caches do not write-combine.

If you had 500 MB RAM, you could extract to a RAMDISK ;-)

I agree that it is frustrating when the self-extractor
takes 58 minutes in FreeDOS and less than 1 in Windows,
or less than 5 in the DOS 7.1 of Win95 or Win98.

You say that when you added RAM or a cache, you saw circa
20% progress after 10 minutes, but I am not sure whether
you aborted the experiments at that point or whether the
extraction crashed at that point instead of completing in
a total of 50 minutes?

You could test how long it takes to extract the files
in Windows and then boot FreeDOS and use either COPY or
XCOPY, with or without a cache, to copy it. I remember
a thread where I suggested an XCOPY patch to pre-allocate
all clusters before incrementally copying file contents,
in order to avoid frequent incremental FAT updates, but
I do not remember whether pre-compiled XCOPY binaries
with this patch are available. It may improve speed :-)

All 4000 files in the self-extracting ZIP use ZIP version
2 compatible DEFLATE compression, so the problem does NOT
seem to be a too fancy compression, which would need more
RAM or optimizations for newer CPU etc. I guess the REAL
problem is FreeDOS being slow in file and metadata writes.

I am sure we have had threads about this before, even
with people testing kernel patches to aid performance,
maybe somebody remembers something specific about that?

Regards, Eric




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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[wilhelm . spiegl]

I am no programmer, but I can test things like this for clarification:
I downloaded open-watcom-2_0-c-dos.exe (an extracting .exe) at:
https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2/releases/tag/Current-build
140 MB size.
First I extracted it with Windows, it contains 4,018 files, and has a
size of
335 MB extracted (.exe extracted with 7zip). The extraction with Win
needed
in about one minute (I assume less). 

Installing FreeDOS and watcom 1.9 delivered with FreeDOS 2303 on
virtualbox (installed with fdimples) needed in about one minute
for installation and in about one minute for deinstallation. Copying /
deleting files from iso to virtual HD was extremely fast.

FreeDOS 2303 on 2 GB virtualbox vdi had 32 MB RAM, 1,738 GB free space.

I copied open watcom2 (see above) into the same 2GB vdi in virtualbox.
Installing open-watcom-2_0-c-dos.exe (140 MB) in virtualbox with FD 2303
really
needs much longer. But from my sight it is not astonishing as it has to
extract
in about 4000 files from this .exe file. Needed time: 58 minutes,
result: 4018 files, 335 MB

I increased the RAM to 256 MB (everything else unchanged). 20% of
installation
were done in 10 minutes --> in about 50 minutes. stopped at 10 minutes.

Additionally I added "install=lbacache buf 20" in fdconfig.sys. (of
course I checked if it was really installed!) 

20% of installation were done in 10 minutes --> in about 50 minutes.
stopped at 10 minutes.

At last I ran it from an MS product "7.1" on the same machine with a
.vdi and a 
.vhd image. The whole installation (4,018 files, 335 MB) was REALLY done
in
three or four minutes. 

No idea why FreeDOS is so slow with extraction, but it seems to be not
the debt of the .exe file. 

Willi 

>> That depends.
> 
> whatever 'depends'.
> 
>> Besides poorly optimized system caches, is the
>> installer doing things that blow the cache and increase the miss rate?
> 
> whatever the installer is doing: unless you find a valid 'this is
> doing something in a stupid way' point this installer is as much a
> valid benchmark point as any other. Possibly not the most relevant,
> but still...
> 
>> You noted a significantly increased download zip.  Is everything
>> actually necessary?  Did you download a debug build that will have
>> additional binary code or is the download zip an optimized build?
> 
> in what way this is related to 'FreeDOS install speed is slow' escapes
> me.
> 
> Tom
> 
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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 3:12 PM Volkert via Freedos-devel
 wrote:
>
> On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 11:35 AM tom ehlert  wrote:
>>
>> > Over a month ago, I opened an issue on the FreeDOS project on
>> > GitLab about the Open Watcom v2 installer being extremely slow in
>> > FreeDOS. It takes an hour or more on FreeDOS, while the same
>> > installation completes on MS-DOS 7.1 within just a few minutes.
>>
>> either you report your config.sys and autoexec.bat for both tests
>> or your report is basically useless.
>>
>> write caching smartdrv (which freedos is known not to have) makes a
>> HUGE difference for installers, so you are comparing apples to oranges.
>>
>> of course running both without autoexec/config.sys would place them on
>> an equal playing field.
>
>
> OK, that's a fair point. When I have time again, I'll try to do more of an 
> apples-and-apples comparison
> between the two, and then I'll share my findings here.
>
> An installation time of an hour still seems excessively slow though, even 
> when no disk cache is loaded.

What does BUFFERS (config.sys) say?
What kernel version (ver /r)? Try again with an older (e.g. 2041) kernel.
Is this atop FAT16 or FAT32?
What host and guest cpus are you using?
How much RAM is available? (Use more than 64 MB.)
Does anyone know what extender (e.g. Causeway) the installer is using?
What VirtualBox version? Is VT-X enabled? (Recent versions only run on
64-bit hosts with VT-X enabled.)
And yes, disable DOSLFN ("doslfn d") first, if it's loaded.

(Sorry, I haven't tried it myself.)


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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[tom ehlert]

> That depends.

whatever 'depends'.

> Besides poorly optimized system caches, is the
> installer doing things that blow the cache and increase the miss rate?

whatever the installer is doing: unless you find a valid 'this is
doing something in a stupid way' point this installer is as much a
valid benchmark point as any other. Possibly not the most relevant,
but still...


>  You noted a significantly increased download zip.  Is everything
> actually necessary?  Did you download a debug build that will have
> additional binary code or is the download zip an optimized build?

in what way this is related to 'FreeDOS install speed is slow' escapes
me.

Tom



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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[Louis Santillan]

That depends.  Besides poorly optimized system caches, is the
installer doing things that blow the cache and increase the miss rate?
 You noted a significantly increased download zip.  Is everything
actually necessary?  Did you download a debug build that will have
additional binary code or is the download zip an optimized build?

On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 1:12 PM Volkert via Freedos-devel
 wrote:
>
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 11:35 AM tom ehlert  wrote:
>>
>>
>> > Over a month ago, I opened an issue on the FreeDOS project on
>> > GitLab about the Open Watcom v2 installer being extremely slow in
>> > FreeDOS. It takes an hour or more on FreeDOS, while the same
>> > installation completes on MS-DOS 7.1 within just a few minutes.
>>
>> either you report your config.sys and autoexec.bat for both tests
>> or your report is basically useless.
>>
>> write caching smartdrv (which freedos is known not to have) makes a
>> HUGE difference for installers, so you are comparing apples to oranges.
>>
>> of course running both without autoexec/config.sys would place them on
>> an equal playing field.
>
>
> OK, that's a fair point. When I have time again, I'll try to do more of an 
> apples-and-apples comparison between the two, and then I'll share my findings 
> here.
>
> An installation time of an hour still seems excessively slow though, even 
> when no disk cache is loaded.
>
> What added value does that issue reporting project on GitLab have over this 
> mailing list, by the way? Is it actively used, or is it expected to in the 
> future?
>
> Thanks.
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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[Volkert via Freedos-devel]

On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 11:35 AM tom ehlert  wrote:

>
> > Over a month ago, I opened an issue on the FreeDOS project on
> > GitLab about the Open Watcom v2 installer being extremely slow in
> > FreeDOS. It takes an hour or more on FreeDOS, while the same
> > installation completes on MS-DOS 7.1 within just a few minutes.
>
> either you report your config.sys and autoexec.bat for both tests
> or your report is basically useless.
>
> write caching smartdrv (which freedos is known not to have) makes a
> HUGE difference for installers, so you are comparing apples to oranges.
>
> of course running both without autoexec/config.sys would place them on
> an equal playing field.


OK, that's a fair point. When I have time again, I'll try to do more of an
apples-and-apples comparison between the two, and then I'll share my
findings here.

An installation time of an hour still seems excessively slow though, even
when no disk cache is loaded.

What added value does that issue reporting project on GitLab have over this
mailing list, by the way? Is it actively used, or is it expected to in the
future?

Thanks.
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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[tom ehlert]

> Over a month ago, I opened an issue on the FreeDOS project on
> GitLab about the Open Watcom v2 installer being extremely slow in
> FreeDOS. It takes an hour or more on FreeDOS, while the same
> installation completes on MS-DOS 7.1 within just a few minutes.

either you report your config.sys and autoexec.bat for both tests
or your report is basically useless.

write caching smartdrv (which freedos is known not to have) makes a
HUGE difference for installers, so you are comparing apples to oranges.

of course running both without autoexec/config.sys would place them on
an equal playing field.


Tom



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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[Louis Santillan]

BTW, Ladislav did some performance testing on a Pentium 4 last
October.  He gives hints on how to make FD a bit faster, though still
about 50% performance of MS-DOS in a best case scenario.  Namely,
Ladislav suggests (on a 512MB RAM machine) using UIDE w/a 160MB cache,
and LBAcache with 16843KB (16MB) cache.

https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/message/37727725/
https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/freedos-devel/thread/Dog.2N9f.5Ml4lqeFp6Q.1ZND6x%40seznam.cz/#msg37727725

On Tue, Mar 7, 2023 at 8:35 PM Louis Santillan  wrote:
>
> You haven't detailed anything about system configuration for this
> machine.  What hardware (CPU, RAM, DISK)?  Are you using FAT32 or
> FAT16? LFN?  LFN provided by which driver?  Which drivers do you have
> loaded w/FD and with MS-DOS?  Are you using a drive cache in either
> one?
>
> On Tue, Mar 7, 2023 at 5:08 PM Volkert via Freedos-devel
>  wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 2:02 AM Ralf Quint  wrote:
> >>
> >> Well, I just download both v1.9 and the latest 2.0 and the later is 1.75x 
> >> as big as v1.9 (143MB vs 81MB), so there must be some more than trivial 
> >> difference between the installers...
> >
> >
> > I was referring specifically to the DOS installer code within the sources. 
> > The side of the payloads may (the stuff being installed by the installer) 
> > may indeed have changed considerably.
> > ___
> > Freedos-devel mailing list
> > Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
> > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel


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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[Volkert via Freedos-devel]

On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 2:02 AM Ralf Quint  wrote:

> Well, I just download both v1.9 and the latest 2.0 and the later is 1.75x
> as big as v1.9 (143MB vs 81MB), so there must be some more than trivial
> difference between the installers...
>

I was referring specifically to the DOS installer code within the sources.
The side of the payloads may (the stuff being installed by the installer)
may indeed have changed considerably.
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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[Ralf Quint]

On 3/7/2023 4:54 PM, Volkert via Freedos-devel wrote:


The last time I installed OW was on one of my physical laptops,
which are currently in storage, so I can't easily test this right
now, and I am pretty sure that I installed the v1.9 from
openwatcom.org . Not sure if both 1.9 and
2.0 are actually using the same installer...

I would guess they do, since it doesn't look like the DOS installer 
was touched much since the project was forked.


Well, I just download both v1.9 and the latest 2.0 and the later is 
1.75x as big as v1.9 (143MB vs 81MB), so there must be some more than 
trivial difference between the installers...



Ralf

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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[Volkert via Freedos-devel]

On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 1:40 AM Ralf Quint  wrote:

>
> Well, I know some folks will hate me for that (what else is new) but there
> is no MS-DOS 7.1. It's the bootup DOS system of Windows 95SR2 and up.
>

That's just getting pedantic about things. Whatever you prefer to call it,
the "bootup DOS system of Windows 95SR2" doesn't have this problem, but
FreeDOS does. At least as of version 1.3. By the way, I'm pretty sure I
used FAT32 in both cases. And even if I didn't, the use of FAT32 really
shouldn't lead to such an excessive slowdown. I would still consider that a
bug that ought to be looked into.


> So possible issues at hand could be the use of FAT32 and/or long file
> names, which I somehow recall OW2 defaulting to.
>

Funny you'd mention LFN support, since the maintainer of OW2 disabled it
when I initially reported this finding there, before someone else pointed
out that it ran fine in "MS-DOS 7.1":

https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2/issues/1025

Anyway, disabling LFN support in the installer did not resolve the issue,
so it's not that.


> The last time I installed OW was on one of my physical laptops, which are
> currently in storage, so I can't easily test this right now, and I am
> pretty sure that I installed the v1.9 from openwatcom.org. Not sure if
> both 1.9 and 2.0 are actually using the same installer...
>
I would guess they do, since it doesn't look like the DOS installer was
touched much since the project was forked.
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Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

[Ralf Quint]

On 3/7/2023 4:11 PM, Volkert via Freedos-devel wrote:

Hi,

Over a month ago, I opened an issue on the FreeDOS project on GitLab 
about the Open Watcom v2 installer being extremely slow in FreeDOS. It 
takes an hour or more on FreeDOS, while the same installation 
completes on MS-DOS 7.1 within just a few minutes. I've reproduced 
this in VM instances, both with VirtualBox and Qemu/KVM on a Linux 
host. I have not tested this on a bare-metal DOS machine.


See https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/issue-reporting/-/issues/42

But I haven't seen anybody respond to the issue. Is that really the 
proper place to report FreeDOS bugs these days? With the 
`issue-reporting` subproject, this is at least implied.


To be clear, I used a recent DOS build of the Open Watcom v2 fork 
 to test this. I did 
not explicitly test this with the old original v1.9 release, but since 
the installer runs fine on MS-DOS, it seems unlikely that this issue 
with FreeDOS was introduced in the forked project.


The difference in installation time is extreme, which suggests some 
kind of bug or inefficiency in the file access routines of FreeDOS.


Could somebody maybe take a look at this?

Also, I wonder if others have noticed similar poor file I/O 
performance under FreeDOS with other DOS software.
Well, I know some folks will hate me for that (what else is new) but 
there is no MS-DOS 7.1. It's the bootup DOS system of Windows 95SR2 and up.


So possible issues at hand could be the use of FAT32 and/or long file 
names, which I somehow recall OW2 defaulting to.


The last time I installed OW was on one of my physical laptops, which 
are currently in storage, so I can't easily test this right now, and I 
am pretty sure that I installed the v1.9 from openwatcom.org. Not sure 
if both 1.9 and 2.0 are actually using the same installer...



Ralf

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