Amithlon Setup Guide

[jdog320]

Originally Posted by SnkBitten

Bernie is still active. He's on one of my Amithlon threads on another forum. He appears to have no interest in Amithlon and probably wishes it would just fade away

He did mention he doesn't care if people use his work in Amithlon, but would prefer people pay for licensing for the other parts (Harold's contributions, P96, AmigaOS 3.9, etc..). He of course realizes that is near impossible to do these days.

Does he still know how everything works?
I would like to see a modern amithlon restart even if it doesn't include the os or roms, which it should've been in the first place, though times are different.....

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by jdog320

Does he still know how everything works?
I would like to see a modern amithlon restart even if it doesn't include the os or roms, which it should've been in the first place, though times are different.....

I'm sure he does, though he has no interest in re-doing Amithlon. He has mentioned a few small bits of info on how he'd do things differently since hardware has drastically changed since then, but not really anything you could use to build Amithlon II without a much deeper knowledge of how he did things initially. A lot of it was hacking the 2.4 kernel to make things work. Some of those things are now handled in the kernel and some of those things aren't possible to hack into the kernel now.

I still like Amithlon's approach with direct access to the hardware without an emulation layer (things like keyboard/mouse interrupts, HD/CD controllers, Video, etc...) and then only needing an emulation layer for the OS/Software. These are the primary reasons Amithlon has a more "real" feel than pure emulation.

[jdog320]

Originally Posted by SnkBitten

I'm sure he does, though he has no interest in re-doing Amithlon. He has mentioned a few small bits of info on how he'd do things differently since hardware has drastically changed since then, but not really anything you could use to build Amithlon II without a much deeper knowledge of how he did things initially. A lot of it was hacking the 2.4 kernel to make things work. Some of those things are now handled in the kernel and some of those things aren't possible to hack into the kernel now.

I still like Amithlon's approach with direct access to the hardware without an emulation layer (things like keyboard/mouse interrupts, HD/CD controllers, Video, etc...) and then only needing an emulation layer for the OS/Software. These are the primary reasons Amithlon has a more "real" feel than pure emulation.

Quite a shame, I reallt wished he would document on how amithlon would have lowlevel hw access because that's what sets it apart and how was he able to patch the os to not use chipset functions.

I tried to follow the guide from @croupier but it fails to boot the new bigird.gz...


I get the following error : ........Out of memory (maybe low or extended)


My files are the following sizes:

• my new diskfile_haage was a 40MB winuae hdf file, so it's 40 MB
• after the resizing and inserting the above mentioned file in bigird, the new size is 44,7MB (46.891.008 bytes)
• after gzipping that file, the size is 17,9 MB (18.863.876 bytes)

I tried several values for the ramdisk size and the leavepages values in the amithlon file; even the values that Croupier used for his 50MB bigird file. Shouldn't that be more than enough for my 40MB bigird file?

[SnkBitten]

How much physical memory does your system have and what is your mem=xxxM statement in your init string?

Amithlon and memory have very specific limitations so changing the ramdisk size can have an effect on that.

I has 2 gb, but in single channel so it does work. Methanoid confirmed this, he has the same motherboard. Also, the default amithlon bigird.gz does work.

I have not entered a mem=xxx value. I have already tried it with mem=512mb. This did not change anything.

I suspected it had to do with lack of available memory in the dos environment, so I booted from the freedos usb and canceled out of the freedos setup to get a command prompt. Then when I do Loadlin @amithlon, the error does not appear, but I get a black screen and then nothing; not even the output you normally get when using "console_level=4".

This is my string: kernel4 init=/linuxrc console_level=4 root=/dev/ram1 initrd=d:\bigg-ird.gz vga=769 ramdisk_size=45792 leavepages=30528 crusoe

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by PvdV1

I has 2 gb, but in single channel so it does work. Methanoid confirmed this, he has the same motherboard. Also, the default amithlon bigird.gz does work.

I have not entered a mem=xxx value. I have already tried it with mem=512mb. This did not change anything.

I suspected it had to do with lack of available memory in the dos environment, so I booted from the freedos usb and canceled out of the freedos setup to get a command prompt. Then when I do Loadlin @amithlon, the error does not appear, but I get a black screen and then nothing; not even the output you normally get when using "console_level=4".

This is my string: kernel4 init=/linuxrc console_level=4 root=/dev/ram1 initrd=d:\bigg-ird.gz vga=769 ramdisk_size=45792 leavepages=30528 crusoe

That 2 GB can still be an issue because your BIOS sees the memory which affects how PCI devices are mapped and then how Amithlon attempts to remap everything in to Amiga addresses.

To expand that a little, you are dealing with three different memory mapping processes. BIOS, Linux/Amithlon and AmigaOS. It makes it a huge issue when trying to go over 1 GB of ram on the motherboard.

You also do not need the Crusoe command at the end of your init string.

I'll have a look in another old computer I have here.
It's a Asus P5K-VM motherboard with 4x1GB Ram (and integrated graphics I believe); Nvidia Quadro FX 3500; Soundblaster Live!; Sata harddisk and Sata DVD-writer

Mayby I could take one of the ram sticks and put in in the Intel D945GCLF2 board...
Or.... Ik could use this Asus based computer as base to try and install Amithlon on! Do any of you have thoughts on the feasability of that idea, in regards to the compatibility of the Asus P5K-VM board?

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by PvdV1

I'll have a look in another old computer I have here.
It's a Asus P5K-VM motherboard with 4x1GB Ram (and integrated graphics I believe); Nvidia Quadro FX 3500; Soundblaster Live!; Sata harddisk and Sata DVD-writer

Mayby I could take one of the ram sticks and put in in the Intel D945GCLF2 board...
Or.... Ik could use this Asus based computer as base to try and install Amithlon on! Do any of you have thoughts on the feasability of that idea, in regards to the compatibility of the Asus P5K-VM board?

I don't expect the nVidia Quadro FX 3500 PCI-e card to function other than VESA unaccelerated screen modes. SATA optical drives aren't supported in linux kernel 2.4 so Amithlon can't support them either. And of course you'll need to remove 3 GB of ram.

http://amithlon.snkbitten.com/Docs/SupportedHW.html

will give you a good base of what can work and/or what should work.

Amithlon is very picky about it's hardware and you have to think 1999/2000 hardware and maybe a few years plus. I've been looking at what is supported and seeing if I can push into "newer" versions of what was supported, of course graphics cards still relying on the specific supported cards.

[Methanoid]

@snkbitten - re the SDVIA1A5E1IR - do you have a decent pic of it or the chips on it? It looks like a generic VIA controller for the SATA/IDE side but the USB might be special. If we identify the chips we might find other controllers that fit the bill also?

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by Methanoid

@snkbitten - re the SDVIA1A5E1IR - do you have a decent pic of it or the chips on it? It looks like a generic VIA controller for the SATA/IDE side but the USB might be special. If we identify the chips we might find other controllers that fit the bill also?

No sorry, that was a board someone posted or messaged me as working for them in their system.

Well, I had success using the diskswap method. I copied the entire contents of the CD-ROM to the Amiga partition using WinUAE. After placing the hard-disk back I was able to install 3.9 from the folder on the disk. (B.t.w.: no assign was needed). Still using 2gb ram.
Thank you Snkbitten for this suggestion!
I will continue to try the rest of the guide, updates etc., maybe this weekend.

[Methanoid]

@snkbitten, I know you've built kernels... is there ANY way we can remove the limits on memory... I dont care if Amithlon has 512Mb ram but this refusal to boot on systems with 1GB or 2GB (depending on setup) is a major buzzkill. I have some systems that have 8-16Gb Ram which would otherwise run it.

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by Methanoid

@snkbitten, I know you've built kernels... is there ANY way we can remove the limits on memory... I dont care if Amithlon has 512Mb ram but this refusal to boot on systems with 1GB or 2GB (depending on setup) is a major buzzkill. I have some systems that have 8-16Gb Ram which would otherwise run it.

Short answer, no.

Longer answer, you'd have to rewrite Amithlon (not the kernel) to handle a system with a larger memory pool.

From Bernie in one of my threads.

It was a design decision. There were three separate views of memory in a system like Amithlon --- the 68k's view of memory, the x86's view of memory, and the PCI bus's view of memory. For mixed-mode programming to be anything other than a complete nightmare, the first two have to match. And to make drivers for DMA-using PCI devices easier, it's really helpful if all three views are identical. In theory, AmigaOS is prepared for peripherals' view to be different from the processor's, and there are routines that drivers should call to do the translation between views. However, on a lot of real Amiga hardware, that translation wasn't necessary, so to not introduce extra complications for Amiga programmers, I decided to make all views identical.

Which is easier said than done --- the address space for PCI expansions on 32 bit x86 is in the 3GB to 4GB range. Unfortunately, in a linux x86 system, that's where the kernel expects to be mapped. So for a 1:1 mapping, the PCI space has to be moved.

(in 1999) 1GB was almost unheard of amounts of actual memory, so moving the PCI space to the 1GB to 2GB range (the 2GB to 3GB was used for the actual executable, in the only bit of memory which wasn't 1:1 mapped) was a perfectly sensible thing to do.

Presumably, most memory controllers could be reprogrammed to have a memory hole at 1GB prior to shifting the PCI space, but unlike PCI, they are much less documented.

These days, my approach would be very different --- use a 64 bit kernel, with the kernel safely tucked away a long way beyond the 4GB, and leave the PCI where it is (and where space for it has been set aside by the BIOS/firmware). But Amithlon was 18 years ago, so that wasn't an option.

With that said you'd need to rewrite Amithlon to work with a 64bit kernel and not move the PCI memory space, etc... Unfortunately we don't have source code for Amithlon, only for the kernel (which is a very small part of Amithlon).

1 GB physical memory is typically the limit though the way some systems bios's handle memory, 1.5 GB and 2 GB physical amounts can be on the board. However this still impacts Amithlon and the way it moves things around in memory making the system potentially less compatible when adding hardware that uses the PCI memory space (for Amithlon to use or if only for the Host system to use).

This is why I have a box dedicated to Amithlon. It doesn't dual boot any other OS and I have it configured as best as possible for Amithlon/Amiga use only. I could add another OS but I would leave the hardware system specs alone, forcing the second/third OS to live within the limits of Amithlons hardware limits.

[tero]

Originally Posted by SnkBitten

Unfortunately we don't have source code for Amithlon

Is the source for the AmigaXL executable not the same as for Amithlon?
Located in 'AmigaXL/Extras/source' on the CD.

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by tero

Is the source for the AmigaXL executable not the same as for Amithlon?
Located in 'AmigaXL/Extras/source' on the CD.

No, that is for the AmigaXL emulation that runs under QNX, not Amithlon.

AmigaXL is like UAE running under the QNX Operating System. You log in to your QNX session and run AmigaXL and can flip back and forth between the two. AmigaXL uses the hardware that QNX is using by talking through emulation layers between AmigaOS and QNX.

Amithlon is an emulation that contains a stripped down linux kernel to interact with I/O between AmigaOS and the physical hardware. You can boot to DOS and launch Amithlon....or boot to linux and launch Amithlon......and Amithlon will kick those "boot" OS's out of the way and use it's specific linux kernel. Amithlon then talks directly to the hardware.

[tero]

I know how Amithlon works, but i thought AmigaXL works the same way but is only supported by qnx. Like launching qnx software e.g.
Well, a pity. I would've liked it to run it on modern CPUs.

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by tero

I know how Amithlon works, but i thought AmigaXL works the same way but is only supported by qnx. Like launching qnx software e.g.
Well, a pity. I would've liked it to run it on modern CPUs.

AmigaXL is just a software emulator running on QNX. And it only runs on a very old version of QNX from what I've read from others trying to get it working on newer versions than what came with the AmigaOSXL/Amithlon package.

[tero]

Yeah, Amithlon came with a QNX bundled. Never tried that, though.
SOme time ago you could download qnx 4.x from their website, but it seems it's long since gone.

[jdog320]

Will bernie ever release the sourcecode to amithlon?