What is the Guru-ROM good for ?

[salocinx]

Hi there!

I received an A2000 today :-D It has an Impact A2000-HC+8 Series II extension board with an SCSI hard drive mounted. Moreover the EPROM has been exchanged with Guru-ROM 6.9.

What is the Guru-ROM good for? Is this the original ROM for this board?

I somewhere read that I need to prepare the disk with FaaastPrep in order to achieve max I/O speed (something to do with 24bit DMA mask?). But when starting FaaastPrep, it doesn't recognize my drive and says "bind drivers not loaded"... but I see the partitions on the workbench

[mark_k]

I don't have a Guru-ROM but hopefully this is correct...

The previous owner would have replaced the original GVP ROM with the Guru-ROM. The Guru-ROM is supposed to be faster with fewer bugs.

FaastPrep is probably looking for gvpscsi.device (the device name used by the GVP ROM), whereas the Guru-ROM has omniscsi.device. It might be possible to tell FaastPrep to use omniscsi.device, but from memory I'm not sure. You can use HDToolBox instead (add a SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=omniscsi.device tooltype to its icon).

Setting Mask to 0xFFFFFFE should work fine. It may well already be that value, you can check with HDToolBox.

[salocinx]

hi mark. many thanks for replying. so if I understood you correctly, the omniscsi.device is already on the ROM (Guru-EPROM on my Impact A2000) - otherwise I would have to provide FaastPrep or HDToolBox with that file... right ?

Btw, do you have any suggestions how to improve transfer speed? I measured with SysInfo and the SCSI HD (Quantum 1280S) and it performs pretty bad, only about 900kb/s... On Ralph Babels Website is a table with speeds up to 3.5-4.7mb/s with adapter chip 33C93A - which is the one mounted on my card. Moreover, I have put 8mb directly onto the expansion card.

Any ideas how to improve the transfer speed ?

[alexh]

Originally Posted by salocinx

so if I understood you correctly, the omniscsi.device is already on the ROM (Guru-EPROM on my Impact A2000)

Yes omniscsi.device is the driver and its in your ROM and so you do not need to "binddrivers"

Originally Posted by salocinx

otherwise I would have to provide FaastPrep or HDToolBox with that file... right ?

Wrong. FaastPrep and HDToolBox are disk partition tools. They are not drivers.

They USE drivers which is why FaastPrep doesn't work for you. It is hard coded / defaulted to look for the standard driver "gvpscsi.device". Having upgraded to a GURU ROM your hard drive is now using driver "omniscsi.device"

Originally Posted by salocinx

Any ideas how to improve the transfer speed ?

Which file system are you using? How about trying PFS3?

What buffers do you have allocated to your filesystem?

[mark_k]

Yes, omniscsi.device is in ROM, and (assuming you haven't disabled your SCSI controller's ROM) is automatically loaded by Kickstart at boot time.

I don't know whether your hard disk supports synchronous transfers. It might not, in which case the limit (according to the table on Ralph Babel's site) would be 2.3MB/sec.

Also, I don't know how SysInfo's disk speed test works. How large a chunk of data does it read? Does it read data from the same offset every time (so it could be supplied from the hard disk's cache), or does it read continuously (which would require the HD actually read data from its platters)? Does SysInfo allocate its data transfer buffer in fast RAM, or does it use chip RAM for compatibility? Also, SysInfo uses (I think) a 3-bitplane high-res screen which would reduce available DMA bandwidth to chip RAM.

You should definitely check your partitions' Mask values. 0xFFFFFE would be the best value to use. You can use HDToolBox to check. Just add a SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=omniscsi.device tootype to its Workbench icon before running it.

You could also try a different disk-benchmarking program and see if that gives different results.

[salocinx]

Thanks for the basic principles, now I start to understand the relations ... :-)

I now provided HDToolBox with "omniscsi.device" and it recognizes the drive correctly.

@alexh: I am currently using "Standard File System/Fast File System" with "International Mode". Buffers is set to 30.

@mark: The partition's mask values are already set to 0xfffffe (Max-Transfer: 0xffffff). What do you mean by synchronous transfer? Parallel read/write actions?

Btw I now moved the Impact A2000-HC+8 Series II to my A4000, but I get the same speed results as on the A2000.

I will try PFS3 next and check out a different benchmarking program.

Many thanks so far and I am glad to get more infos & suggestions how to improve the performance.

[salocinx]

On the Guru-ROM installation disk, there in the readme file on several lines a printed installation manual for the ROM mentioned... I don't have it and I can't find it in the web. Do you know something about such a document ?

[zipper]

http://amiga-manuals.xiik.net/manual...nual_DEpdf.rar

[salocinx]

Great! Thanks zipper - wow it's huge, going to read it tomorrow. German is also fine :-)

[salocinx]

For those who want to use FaaastPrep for partitioning the hard disk (with Guru-ROM), it works almost the same as in HDToolBox:

Click on FastPrep (or ExpertPrep) icon and go to menu "Information". Then add the following tool-type:

DRIVERNAME=omniscsi.device [Version1.x]
SCSIDRIVER=omniscsi.device [Version 2.x]

Don't forget to hit enter and finally "save" - double-click the program-icon and it just works perfectly...

[Josh]

Corrected the file name. Now the link to GuruROM manual is this:

http://amiga-manuals.xiik.net/manual..._Manual_DE.rar


Cheers Josh

[obitus1990]

An old thread, but, does a copy of this manual in English exist anywhere? I have purchased a GuruROM and adapter recently, and don’t have the software or the manual for it.

[grelbfarlk]

Sorry I don't remember where I found this, but this was the only part of the manual I needed. I did find the software somewhere.

https://i.imgur.com/Lfx99bY.png

[obitus1990]

For the A500 sidecar, the Impact Series II, HD+8, it appears that the only setting I need to change is JP2, since my SCSI chip is the one that ends with “A.” I don’t see any other jumpers that match the list Of jumpers to change with this board. Does that sound correct?

[grelbfarlk]

I'd only be guessing, so I guess yes. Also ignore RDB I guess as well.

[thebajaguy]

I"m in the process of building a new batch of the GuruROM kits with the SpeedGeek adapter and v6.16 ROM. The pre-order thread is over in Amibay, along with a lot of information. For the quick answer about v6.16, it has some of the SpeedGeek A2091 hack enhancements he has done in the past few years built in (not affecting the GVP function as of v6.14 at all, just an update of the number). This is also the same adapter as the most recent version he had produced a few years ago.

I'm also in the process of re-writing the manual (a PDF copy of the German version, chewed on well by Google Translate, is my starting point) and adding my own experience at GVP, and digging into some stuff that was undocumented.

The jumper that is recommended for movement is the clock jumper for the 33C93A. On the Series II HC, HD8, & HC8 boards sold with the oldest 3.x FastROMs, the default was to have the 33C93A (every production Series II board has an A chip, only some pre-release test boards had a -02 non-A chip) clocked in 7Mhz mode. We later pushed that to 14Mhz clock on either the 3.12 or 3.14 release. The faster clocking grants higher bandwidth through the SCSI chip.