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balaton

Re: New to Sam460ex

Posted on: 12/20 22:22 #1

Quite a regular

@jabirulo
Yes but 2015.d does not work with QEMU at all for some reason and I did not have time to find out why (maybe it now accesses something that's not emulated but I don't know what) so I went with the 2015.c version that works and should have all the fixes that are relevant for QEMU. The changelog for 2015.d only says that you can select between EHCI and OHCI but does not mention other USB fixes. It also only seems to be a problem with AROS, AmigaOS4 still works on QEMU with 2015.c U-Boot so it could also be an AROS issue. I'm not sure AROS works on real machine as nobody tried or replied with results so far.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: New to Sam460ex

Posted on: 12/18 17:31 #2

Quite a regular

@m3x
A bit off topic but according to the U-Boot 2015.c changelog there was a change: "fixed USB handling especially for keyboard support". Looks like this broke keyboard with AROS on QEMU sam460ex. Any info on what this change was more exactly? That could help me to find where to look for the problem. Thanks.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: New to Sam460ex

Posted on: 12/16 11:58 #3

Quite a regular

Quote:

balaton wrote:
AROS also worked on QEMU sam460ex before as described at the link in my signature below but the current nightly build also seems to have an issue with finding the keyboard so it does not boot. An older version still boots on QEMU but seems to have a problem with the mouse now. I've reported it on the AROS list so maybe somebody can fix it then you could test with that too but at the moment you'd only get an error on serial with AROS unfortunately.
AmigaOS 4.1FE still boots on QEMU sam460ex so should also work on real machine.

AROS for sam440/sam460 is now fixed and the current nightly build boots with QEMU but still has some problem with the mouse. I don't know if it works on real machine, not sure if anybody tried it yet. Maybe somebody could try and let us know if it boots or not. The on-board SM502 graphics is limited to 640x480 in AROS and AFAIK there's no driver for ATI/AMD cards so it may not be usable but it would be interesting to know if it boots at all.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: New to Sam460ex

Posted on: 12/13 15:34 #4

Quite a regular

@3VILC
Maybe to simplify things with drivers first you could just remove the graphics card and use the internal on-board sm502 graphics for setup first which should work, then add the graphics card once you have a working system after installing Enhancer for the drivers.
Are you using the right AmigaOS version for you machine? Other versions for sam440 or similiar might read kickstart files but won't boot, only the sam460 version has the right kernel and drivers. If you need a working AmigaOS system to add drivers or format usb drive or similar you could try booting AmigaOS on QEMU, it should work with -machine sam460ex but AmigaOS should boot even with the old U-Boot version.
Since the old U-Boot version has problems reading USB drives maybe you'd need to write the updater to an iso or a hard disk partition that it can read.
There's some documentation in the U-Boot update that tells you how to find out the right version:
Quote:

Another way to check the base clock is from the System Information U-Boot menu (CLK freq)

After that, you need to check which brand is the flash chip mounted on the board, it could be ATMEL or SST, this will needed later when running the updater.

But not sure if the CLK freq is shown in the older U-Boot but probably can also be found from the info printed to serial which is something like:
Quote:

U-Boot 2010.06.05 (Jan 23 2019 - 15:07:17)

CPU: AMCC PowerPC 460EX Rev. B at 1150 MHz (PLB=230 OPB=115 EBC=115)

and maybe it could be guessed somehow from the frequencies reported in this line. Or you could try bdinfo command in U-Boot which prints some freqs too.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: New to Sam460ex

Posted on: 12/10 20:53 #5

Quite a regular

@3VILC
I think the 2010.06.05 U-Boot version (which was also used in QEMU until now) had problems with booting from USB sticks but the keyboard should work (at least with some keyboards). If not, there's also serial port as an alternative to use U-Boot that should always work but needs another machine and a terminal emulator to use.
MorphOS does have SiI 3112 driver and it used to work in QEMU which also emulates this card but MorphOS does not boot on QEMU's sam460ex for a while due to the way it sets up the MMU that relies on a cache in real chip that is not emulated. (Basically it overwrites the TLB entry it uses to run that code without having another entry for it and hopes that the last used cache that stores the last 4 entries in the PPC440 covers this until the new mapping is set. Other OSes do it in a better and safer way that does not rely on this and works also on QEMU.) I don't know if this now also hits real machine or it has some other problem there but on QEMU it also only reads the boot.img and stops there.
AROS also worked on QEMU sam460ex before as described at the link in my signature below but the current nightly build also seems to have an issue with finding the keyboard so it does not boot. An older version still boots on QEMU but seems to have a problem with the mouse now. I've reported it on the AROS list so maybe somebody can fix it then you could test with that too but at the moment you'd only get an error on serial with AROS unfortunately.
AmigaOS 4.1FE still boots on QEMU sam460ex so should also work on real machine.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: 2025-December Gaming Competition- Disasteroids 3D ported by "AOS4 fans from Mars"!

Posted on: 12/7 14:35 #6

Quite a regular

@Maijestro
At least now you have debug infos in clib4 so the backtrace is more useful. It seems the problem comes from fclose so maybe you can try snoopy to see what file it tries to access.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: New to Sam460ex

Posted on: 12/6 13:32 #7

Quite a regular

@3VILC
I guess the best place to start is at the home page of the manufacturer of Sam460EX at https://acube-systems.biz/ where there's also a Radeon QuickGuide that you should definitely read.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: Qemu - 100% CPU Utilization

Posted on: 12/4 15:08 #8

Quite a regular

@n3m3
https://www.amigans.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=149641

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: Flare enough

Posted on: 2025/11/23 16:34 #9

Quite a regular

@Maijestro
QEMU does emulate sam460ex too including the different BookE CPU so it could be tested on that but I'm not sure every detail of this system is emulated but it could be improved if that helps testing. Also in AmigaOS most binaries are the same between machines and the kernel handles differences between CPUs in most cases (e.g. A1222 kernel emulates missing FPU) so I'm not sure what alignment issue is referred to here. One difference is that on some systems (at least sam460ex, X5000 and A1222) the kernel uses the SoC's DMA engine so maybe that has some required alignment on real machine that is not there on other systems or QEMU. If this is the case it could be checked in the 460EX DMA engine emulation in QEMU and produce a guest_errors warning for it to help developers but I'm not sure what the real issue is here. In any case it should not crash (unless the app uses DMA itself) as the kernel could also fix it up and provide a warning for such unaligned DMA requests but I don't know how this is handled in AmigaOS and I may be completely wrong about what is causing the problem.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: BBoot on real Pegasos 2

Posted on: 2025/11/6 23:12 #10

Quite a regular

@nbache
Quote:

@balaton
Quote:
Maybe time to change.

Never!

MacOS also had case insensitive file system but since MacOS X (being Unix based) had option to use case sensitive. Not sure if they already made that default or still case insensitive. It may cause problems when porting software from Unix but in AmigaOS having CommandsWithWeirdCapitalisation it would be awkward to type those always that way. Maybe that's why it was case insensitive or that was the norm back then. But I only said to fix Kickstart files to match Kicklayout which I think should be that way and reasonable to expect. It's only one typo that causes annoyance and only because Enhancer Software updates SmartFilesystem to SmartFileSystem but fails to also update Kicklayout accordingly. Fix Enhancer or don't use it, then no problem.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: BBoot on real Pegasos 2

Posted on: 2025/11/6 23:02 #11

Quite a regular

@nbache
Quote:

I think it was actually that way in all generations of AmigasOS. My first one was an A500 with v1.3 (in 1989), and it was certainly case insensitive.

Yes I know but zip can store files with different case in same file so it's not case insensitive like Amiga filesystems are. If you copy Kickstart files on Unix and apply updates (as Kyvos may do) you may end up with both SmartFilesystem and SmartFileSystem in Kickstart.zip then it will find one of them randomly. I'd rather make sure the Kicklayout and files in zip match even if it works with other boot loaders and file systems. They already match for all other files.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: BBoot on real Pegasos 2

Posted on: 2025/11/6 22:52 #12

Quite a regular

@flash
Quote:

About BBoot I think problem with upper/lowercase module letters is inside "boot_aos.c" BBoot source code.

More in zip/zip.c. But BBoot runs without an OS so it has no libc but needs to supply its own which has no strcasecmp so to do that I'd need to implement that first. It would add additional code and make the bboot executable bigger for something that can be easily fixed by either renaming the file or correcting the Kicklayout to match. It just does not worth the hassle in my opinion because having correct filenames listed in Kicklayout is also more correct. BBoot should already give an error message about file not found with name so if somebody sees that can check the filename and see they differ. It's also in the docs and FAQ.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: BBoot on real Pegasos 2

Posted on: 2025/11/6 22:46 #13

Quite a regular

@joerg
Quote:

It was always that way on AmigaOS 4.x, since about 25 years already.

Maybe time to change. There could be case sensitive filesystems where it would not work and zip may have multiple files in it with different case and then a random of those would be found. Only case sensitive is unambigous here.
Quote:

Among other parts BBoot is a replacement for the SLB and therefore should work the same way as the originals: case insensitive name comparison in the file loading part.

BBoot loads from zip which is case sensitive, SLB and amigaboot load from case insensitive filesystems. It would work the same if they loaded from case sensitive filesystem. I know it may be annoying to get this error but better fix either in Kicklayout or file name so they match then there should be no problem. All files are listed with correct case except someone somewhere mistyped SmartFileSystem and that's causing problem.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: BBoot on real Pegasos 2

Posted on: 2025/11/3 21:18 #14

Quite a regular

@joerg
Info-Zip only became usable in 1992 (before that could only unzip) and wasn't available when lha got widespread on the Amiga in the end of 80's. At that time PKZip may also had used older compression methods yet that were not as good as lha plus it wasn't freely available for Amiga (if at all) so lha was a better choice then.
For BBoot zip isn't just for speed but for easy usability. E.g. on macOS you can make a zip just by right clicking on a folder without needing to install any tools for that and it's probably the same on Windows and on any operating system (except maybe Amiga) so zip is the simplest to use for novice users. Replacing it with something else would need other tools to make the Kickstart initrd so that would be a step back. I think the speed doesn't mainly depend on unzipping but loading the file from disk so using LZO may not be significantly faster but would require an obscure compression tool to use. Zip is a good compromise between size speed and easy of use.
Case sensitivity does not depend on the unzip implementation. I could uppercase or lowercase the name before comparing but that's additional code and on unix it's possible to make zip with files only differing in case so then case insensitive compare would find a random one. It's better to fix the Kicklayout.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: BBoot on real Pegasos 2

Posted on: 2025/11/2 0:47 #15

Quite a regular

@joerg
Probably the reason for lha on Amiga was that PKZip was copyrighted and maybe also patented while lha was free and achieved better compression than zip but could not replace zip on PC where that was already established but could become widepread on Amiga where zip wasn't yet present. For BBoot none of case insensitivity nor Amiga attributes are relavant as this archive primarily stores the sources that I wrote and compile on Linux so other format would actually lose attributes. Users only need the bboot binary from it and most users use it for QEMU on other platforms where extracting tar.xz is not a problem. So maybe those who use it on real Pegasos II can extract it on some other machine too which is a bit inconvenient but not a big barrier. I'm not sure it's even possible to download it from codeberg from AmigaOS given the browser situation.

Quote:

except for the flags maybe

The flags are exactly the problem why PPC can't use hardfloat in QEMU. The PPC not only has cumulative flags like other archs but also per operation bits which need to be cleared and reset for each operation. Clearing the bit before each operation would be slower than using softfloat and not emulating these is not acceptable either (even optionally as checking for that option would also make it slower, I've tried that before). So the only way would be to detect if guest reads flags and recompute last FP op to provide per operation bits while we could skip updating these bits otherwise if guest does not access them. Most apps never read these so they could use hardfloat then. But somebody should look at implementeing this and submit it to QEMU.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: BBoot on real Pegasos 2

Posted on: 2025/11/2 0:24 #16

Quite a regular

@sailor
The BBoot README says:
Quote:

BBoot is also needed to fix up 64 bit BARs and interrupts for the AmigaOS kernel) or even to boot a real machine faster.

Primary advantage may be that it's faster and if PCI setup is enabled ("Apb" option) then also fixes interrupt controller setting which may avoid lost interrupts with multiple PCI cards. Also truncates 64 bit BARs of newer cards so AmigaOS can see them but that's not enough to use newer GPUs via a bridge because the bridge would also need to be handled which is only done by newer, still unreleased kernel.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: AmigaOne as qemu target

Posted on: 2025/10/28 22:01 #17

Quite a regular

@smarkusg
Yes but it's unclear what are the limitations. Is it some hardware issue or a firmware issue not recognising newer SIMMs or SIMMs with different number of banks or something like that. It's most likely to work with the oldest 1GB modules that were available at the time the firmware was written and least likely to work with newer and larger SIMMs. And maybe not even all of the older ones work but the ones that were tested. It was probably not common to have such large SIMMs back then.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: Kyvos was updated

Posted on: 2025/10/28 21:50 #18

Quite a regular

@smarkusg
Quote:

This will definitely be useful for @walkero with Kyvos. He won't need to modify the code for sam460 or ‘drive=ufat’.
Instead, he will add a link in the documentation to the new U-Boot for SAM460 for older versions of QEMU, along with instructions on how to make this option work properly.

Hopefully this will be in next QEMU release so then no need to get it separately. For older QEMU versions you could get it from the QEMU repo once it gets there. The only issue is that sam460ex does not support the -bios option so you have to rename it to the old name as it looks for it under that name. It can be in a different directory using the -L <firmware dir> option so it can be used even if the QEMU install is in a system dir without replacing the old u-boot there. Adding support for -bios option would not fix old QEMU releases so I skipped that for now but at least the new u-boot-sam460 binary should also work with older versions.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: AmigaOne as qemu target

Posted on: 2025/10/28 21:41 #19

Quite a regular

@Mlehto
The 2bX are not firmware but board revisions I think. Each may have a minimum required firmware version but I only know about two firmware versions available on-line and the last from bPlan does not seem to support 2GB. I think there's a newer maybe on MorphOS storage but I don't know if that's any better. In any case if there's a hardware issue that causes instability with more than 1GB RAM BBoot (or even the firmware) can't fix that. Even if it's a firmware issue not detecting bigger than 1GB SIMM, BBoot on real machine running from firmware can't do anything about that as at that point the firmware has already detected RAM and set up the memory controller at boot which can't be changed later. You'd need a newer firmware probably. I think there was a thread about 2GB on pegasos somewhere that may have some info, maybe on morph.zone?

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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balaton

Re: Kyvos was updated

Posted on: 2025/10/28 15:42 #20

Quite a regular

@smarkusg, @ilbarbax

Please use this version instead and give it some testing:

https://patchew.org/QEMU/2025102815192 ... BB5972E5@zero.eik.bme.hu/

downloading the mbox and using 'git am mbox' on a git clone of QEMU master should give you u-boot-sam460.bin in pc-bios dir which sam460ex will now use if compiled from this version. For older QEMU versions you have to rename the file to the old name but best test it with latest QEMU and let me know if there are any issues. (ADDITIONAL WARNING: As stated in git repo README this version is only for QEMU NOT FOR REAL MACHINES as it may have changes that break those so only use binaries from ACube for real Sam460EX and this one for QEMU.)

The 2015.d version does not seem to work with QEMU for some reason (neither the binary from the update nor if I compile it) but I had no time to investigate why (could be something is missing from emulation that this u-boot version needs). So for now QEMU will stay at 2015.c if I manage to get my patch in before the freeze starting next week. This should be enough to fix USB and other fixes from 2015.d are probably not important until PCIe emulation is also fixed in QEMU sam460ex.

https://qmiga.codeberg.page/

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