Practical patches to tune with 68060 CPU

[utri007]

What patches really make a difference?

FBLIt does make a difference, are there any other like it?

Lets say make a noticeable diffrence with Quake or Duke Nukem.

[daxb]

CopyMem(Quick) patches maybe. Not really a patch but ROM in fast memory is noticeable.

[Kin Hell]

There is Cyberpatcher for the Blizzard & Cyberstorm cards. - Oxyron Patcher is faster though and will work with all cards. - Both these can be dropped into your WB Startup Drawer.

HSMathLibs is also worthwhile.

[utri007]

Cyber patcher / Oxypatcher only helps with programs wich use 68881/2 FPU with 68040 or 68060 machine.

[Kin Hell]

Originally Posted by utri007

Cyber patcher / Oxypatcher only helps with programs wich use 68881/2 FPU with 68040 or 68060 machine.

Is there any other real variant of 060 CPU?

utri007 is right. - The programs I pointed you to will only work with a Working FPU & 030 cards are not supported with Cyber/Oxy Patcher.

HSMathLibs is recommended for all CPU's.

[nogginthenog]

MuRedox from the MuTools package provides similar functionality to Cyberpatcher/OxyPatcher.

Executive improves AmigaOS multitasking, might be worth trying.

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by utri007

Cyber patcher / Oxypatcher only helps with programs wich use 68881/2 FPU with 68040 or 68060 machine.

I believe it can also help with 020/030/040 code that uses the 64-bit integer mul/div instructions (which you'll obviously not see in code compiled/written for 68000/010).


I definitely suggest Executive, it really does smooth out multitasking. The AmigaOS scheduler, while amazing in 1985, is a bit naive in how it handles process priority as the kernel basically blindly gives cycles round-robin to equal priority and will give pretty much all cycles that high-priority tasks ask for. There's no nuanced "niceness" feature like in Linux, which is what Executive adds.

One really nice add-on to classic AmigaOS that helps a lot, particularly if you're using the slow-ass Gayle IDE interface, is a writeback buffering system for mass storage like PowerCache or FutureDriveAccelerator(FDA). This *really* smooths out multitasking because processes no longer block on I/O. The only downside is you have to do a smarter shutdown instead of just powering off your computer.

[Kin Hell]

Originally Posted by amigahope

i believe it can also help with 020/030/040 code that uses the 64-bit integer mul/div instructions (which you'll obviously not see in code compiled/written for 68000/010).


I definitely suggest executive, it really does smooth out multitasking. The amigaos scheduler, while amazing in 1985, is a bit naive in how it handles process priority as the kernel basically blindly gives cycles round-robin to equal priority and will give pretty much all cycles that high-priority tasks ask for. There's no nuanced "niceness" feature like in linux, which is what executive adds.

One really nice add-on to classic amigaos that helps a lot, particularly if you're using the slow-ass gayle ide interface, is a writeback buffering system for mass storage like powercache or futuredriveaccelerator(fda). This *really* smooths out multitasking because processes no longer block on i/o. The only downside is you have to do a smarter shutdown instead of just powering off your computer.

Love it!

Any support in OS 3.1.4+ ?

[cloverskull]

Are these recommendations consistent for a BPPC with an 060? Or are there separate considerations for that accelerator?

[Kin Hell]

Originally Posted by cloverskull

Are these recommendations consistent for a BPPC with an 060? Or are there separate considerations for that accelerator?

Yes

[stevelord]

When you say smarter shutdown is there anything specific you had in mind? What happens if there's a guru?

[daxb]

The data in the cache will be lost then. On Amiga such cache isn't needed because there are much less writes to to on a normal system. If you notice blocks while IO accesses and want to get rid of it. Go for SCSI or take a rest while writes are in process.

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by stevelord

When you say smarter shutdown is there anything specific you had in mind? What happens if there's a guru?

You can run a tool to settle the I/O before turning the machine off. It can be scripted into a soft shutdown (though you still have to turn the power off manually since Amiga doesn't have soft power).

Regarding a software failure, in OS 3.x hard gurus are relatively rare. i.e. as long as the offending software doesn't kill the kernel and drivers, the cache will still write out as best as it can and you won't lose data, and it won't be worse than a regular crash. Obviously you will still want to reboot since classic AmigaOS has no garbage collection.

If the kernel is screwed then you will lose whatever is in the cache and disk validation will have to run, the impact being different if you're running FFS vs a journaled filesystem.

If you're not running any background daemons you don't need to do a special shutdown and can just wait for disk activity to stop before you hit the power switch. The writeback cache solutions for the Amiga don't try to do delayed writes for the purposes of an elevator algorithm like in Linux or Windows, they just split off the writes to a separate process and write as fast as they can.

I never had any problems doing this, and it made file operations much smoother and more memory efficient than the simple read cache from Addbuffers. Even when using the Ultra SCSI controller on my CSPPC it still made a noticeable improvement, and it was night and day when using the onboard ATA interface.

Executive + cache software really do make a difference as despite all the evolution in AmigaOS, process scheduling and mass storage device I/O were mostly unchanged from 1.x and missed out on a lot of modern improvements.