Mounting real CF eats up a lot of RAM
 

I was wondering why my setup in WinUAE is eating a lot of RAM if I mount my real Amiga-formatted CF on it.

I boot to the system with no startup sequence and I am left with 300+KB on a 1MB system, whereas if I mount a directory instead of the CF RDB card I get about 800+KB which sounds about right.

I never noticed such memory leak but before I never tried to do this with a stock A600 alike config. Am I doing something wrong or is this normal?

(WinUAE 2.7.0 btw)

When you mount an Amiga formatted drive in WinUAE it will act exactly like on the real Amiga so HDD buffers for example will use up Ram, the bigger the drive and the more buffers the more Ram you will use.

So if you hook this drive up to a real 1mb A600 I bet the results are the same ;)

I had this drive in my stock A600 before and it didn't eat up that much. Also, I haven't set up the buffers at all, I loaded without a startup-sequence. Nothing has been loaded.

I can try again, but pretty sure that the hard drive shouldn't eat 650KB of RAM :/ It's a 256MB drive, it is impossible, it woould mean attaching a 512MB drive to a 1MB Amiga would render it useless and that defies logic.


[edit] I just remembered, this might have PFS3 AIO on it, would this eat up more RAM? How can I check if it has PFS3?

HDD Buffers are assigned when you partition the drive so if the partition has mounted then the memory for those HDD buffers will be used.

However I have similar findings with SFS, it seems to use a lot of Ram so maybe PFS3 is the same, for example I had a drive setup for an A1200 with 4gb drive using SFS and with 30 buffres for each of 3 partitions it was using almost 1mb Ram just to mount the partitions!

With FFS only 300k :blased

Is it safe to change the buffer then? I don't mind at all reformatting this thing, I am re-instlling everything anyway.
Is there any way to safely optimize this for lower spec machines? Should I switch to FFS? (UGH :sad :guru)

You sure you don't have some extra settings enabled in WinUAE that also uses some Amiga-side memory, like clipboard sharing?

Buffer value can be modified without losing data.

AFAIK with PFS3 1 buffer = 1k of memory.
Each partition has its own buffer.

No, no such thing enabled. Only "Disable UAEFSDB" option checked.
How do I know how many buffers the partition needs? I -never- messed with that setting.
And I forgot how to check if my disk is PFS3 or whatever, I can't really know what dos/3 or dos/4 is.

[edit] Just checked the buffer setting on HDToolbox. Each partition has 30 buffers. If each buffer is 1K, it should not be eating more than 60K!

Try mounting it as IDE0 (with matching A600 hardware config, make also sure Chipset Extra in chipset panel is "A600").

Do you now get different (and hopefully correct) memory usage?

Funny, I had it as IDE0 already and did try it the other way around as UAE, getting the same results.

http://eab.abime.net/attachment.php?...1&d=1388332683

I noticed that on the drives list, when I chose IDE0 it says "Volume: HDF" while choosing UAE it says "N/A".

Also UAE device seems to use less RAM, but still too much:

http://eab.abime.net/attachment.php?...1&d=1388332908

It says HDF to separate between HDF, CD and Tape drives. I either forgot about UAE or decided it can stay because UAE does not support CD or Tape drives in list.

Attach winuaelog.txt with your HDF mounted as UAE.

It's not an HDF, it's a real RDB compactflash.
I will do this and log!

Here's the log attached, hopefully it makes sense.

Log looks fine (except weird dostypes but it shouldn't cause any problems).

Do you get same results if you use 3.1 ROMs?

Yup, same results.

http://eab.abime.net/attachment.php?...1&d=1388434813


I don't remember getting this at all in my A600, though, and I was using this same card and setup for over a year. I'll try it again tomorrow with this card and see what's up.

Dump the RDB to a file and attach it here.

Attach the startup-sequence and user-startup files here.

Do you have some kind of soft-kick enabled? This would certainly need some 512+ KB of RAM.

Rename startup-sequence to startup-sequence.disabled, so that it cannot be found for sure. Wait at least five seconds until all changes are written to disk, then press F12, click on Restart (not Reset!) and Start. Does it still eat that much memory?

Sorry, I never done this, so I'll ask: how do I dump the RDB to a file?
Softkick isn't enabled. Also this log is booting straight into the disk without startup-sequence, so there wouldn't be any chance to softkick a ROM. This applies to your second statement too: I booted WITHOUT startup-sequence from cold boot.

You can use TSGUI for example. Select a partition of the harddrive and choose "save RDB to file" from the menu.
http://thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online...oads/tsgui.lha

I made a couple of quick tests with a 2gb CF I have here, first I setup with PFS3-AIO, copied WB3.1 and booted without SS: (I had by default 3 equal partitions 80 buffers each) WinUAE using A600 quick start, 3.1Rom 40.63

http://eab.abime.net/attachment.php?...1&d=1388484858

Then I setup with FFS: (3 equal partitions 30 buffers each)

http://eab.abime.net/attachment.php?...1&d=1388484862

Just to see if buffers were the cause of the high usage in the first PFS3 test I set 2 partitions (200mb/the rest) and 30 buffers per partition:

http://eab.abime.net/attachment.php?...1&d=1388484866

So a bit was saved but still very high usage with PFS3 compared to FFS!

I'm wondering why PFS3 eats up this much Disk space?

Does official PFS3 do the same? Perhaps some pfs3 svn update accidentally increased memory usage. (I haven't really checked what they do, I just added 1.3 compatibility, NSD and others that can't increase memory usage)