Please refresh my memory...

Is it safe to use SFS on the system partition?

@derfs

Right.
My Seagate Momentus 2.5" drive transfers ~100Mb/s on SAM440ep.


"As of April 2009 mechanical hard disk drives can transfer data at up to 131 MB/s, which is within the capabilities of the older PATA/133 specification. However, high-performance flash drives can transfer data at up to 201 MB/s, exceeding the PATA specification, but well below the capabilities of the SATA 3Gb/s specification."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

So, we wont hit any barriers when using SATA2 in the near future.

And because x1000 seems to have RAID capable controller, we will have insane bandwidth to use, once the drivers appear.

@Helgis

The real life speed difference is small.
DDR2 is still in the PCs mainstream, (IIRC...) originally DDR3 failed to deliver any advantage over DDR2. I think it's untill very recently that CPUs have started to take full advantage of DDR3.
USB3 ... recently I heard that very rarely PC HW manage to use full USB3 bandwidth, so it's only in "coming" stage.

And IMHO there are some limits&needs that define what are sensible maximum bandwidths. USB3 might be usefull in connecting GFX card to a laptop, but for what else would it be needed? x1000 surely would have no use for it, because it has higher bandwidth connection(s) on board already.

Another thing is that high bandwidths increase electric power use. Things like 1Gb ethernet chips were pretty hot for a long time. Only recently they entered in low power SoC chips.

@DaveP

>But given most video editing and streams are purely digital these days why would you want videotoaster?

For realtime digital video effects. (there are limits for pure SW implementation, especially if the SW runs on a non-hard-RTOS)

Notice: I'm not aware of what modern video chips are capable of doing, but I imagine things like audio-video sync when adding effects in runtime/live processing might not be too simple to get perfect...

(and multicore make things even harder/different, @ work it seems to break almost everything (Telecommunication with soft and hard realtime requirements))

@angelheart

>If XMOS is reconfigurable hardware, does this mean that one can change eg a data bus from say 64bit to 128bit ?

No.
If I have understood it correctly, xena has about 40...50 free I/O pins. So it can read/write ~40bit parallel information.

I think the x1000 CPU already has 128bit interface to RAM and high bandwidth interfaces to other chips and PCI slots.

I guess the interface between PPC and xcore is well below 100Mb/sec, that's why it is inline with the PCIex1. (250Mb/sec???? via optional xorro-PCIex1 bridgecard)

>Could a xmos change a single HD media processor bandwidth to double with 2 HD media processors ?

I think one would need more xcore chips for that kind of thing.
Thinking of a NG videotoaster?

Somehow related.

Another nice 3D car game engine:
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/ite ... lator-updated-983206.html

And while I'm in idea mood...

Amiga virus killers need to be ready to start fight against possible next gen Amiga viruses.

And to me it means that a virus killer must be running also on xcore, when the xcore is in Amiga!

btw.

In my latticeXP & xena idea thread i was thinking of implementing a system watchdog functionality to the xena/SAMlatticeXP.
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/v ... p?topic_id=27379&forum=33

But to me it seems that x1000 already has watchdog...
btw. does anyone know how usable is the watchdog of PA6T SoC ?
Can it be used to trigger quicksave+reset if the user I/O etc. is in deadlock?

And... if AOS detects that the reset was caused by watchdog or otherwise spontaneously, it should give the user an option to track application data from RAM ... like possible unwritten disk cache. Or quicksave RAMTEMP, if it was used.

@kas1e

I've not yet done a summary of this thread:
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/v ... 160&viewmode=flat&order=0

But a lot of details were covered there.

The system would enable OS to time & send "quicksave" orders to applications every n. seconds or only when user triggers it or when grim triggers it, etc...

(and quicksave must not overwrite the actual file that is opened, so that it does not save stuff that user does not want on top of the previously opened file, so quicsave must not be same as "save". More like "save to temp" or "save processed stuff to temp" or "save changes to temp".)

So, quicksave should be usable also when user is not going to do reboot anytime soon. It can be used also as a "just in case" measure. Also a UPS power supply indicates that it is running out of power, AOS could tell apps to "quicksave" and later shutdown if (optionally, again) needed.

The feature should be documented first, then implemented to OS, then application developers could start to use it. And ofcourse it does not work with old apps.... untill the AOS7 that I mentioned.

(AOS7 would have perfect resource tracking and MP anyway and it would be able to "freeze to disk" any/every application, including 68k apps in UAE, etc. If user tells it to do so, etc. .... ok .... it's like a "BuiltInActionReplay" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datel_Action_Replay)

@Raziel

>My questions would be
>a) if (as some discussion brought up back when the chip was revealed) more of those chips (added with another - or to the same installed card) would add more power to the written application (as in make it run faster) and

There is one core xcore chip on board of x1000 and the xorro slot is empty/free.
To my understanding, xorro slot has three xcore links to other xcore cores.
Every xcore core has 4 links.
So, we could have a xorro card with four xcore chips (that can have 1 or 4 internal xcores and 3to 12 links to other xcores) in direct connection to xena. Etc?
But let's first find and implement practical use for the first core inside xena.

(in future there could exist xcore chips that have 64 or 256 xcore cores, then the computational power might be more interesting, unless we have other more powerfull options, like those calculation units inside Ruby (the GPGPU of the x1000 that has minimum of 80 and maximum of 800 calculation units))

>b) if those possibility is available to the devs right from the start through an SDK and

If it's not initially, it must appear to the SDK ASAP ! Otherwise there will be disappointments, like with the lattice of SAM.

>c) in what way would such a programmable ("external") chip(s) differ in coding to it in regard to coding to a multi-core cpu (SMP)

If xcore's would be used for offloading CPU tasks, it would need to be accessed like powerUp/warpUp/datatypes did. But the methode is too slow and xcores are pretty slow when compared to the 64bit PPC of x1000.

But xcore should find some use in offloading I/O tasks from the CPU and in enabling flexible and custrom I/O.

@Hans

>And it's a good idea. It does need built in protection against triggering the very action that caused the crash in the first place.
>One of my friends said that him and a few others created a page with javascript that continually opened new windows. This was back in the days when Netscape was a major browser. Anyway, visiting this page would trigger a mass opening of windows until it crashed. The browser was designed to restore your settings from last time and so, every time that the browser was opened, it would visit this page, spawn hundreds of windows, and crash. An infinite loop of crashing.
>This is why Firefox asks you if you want to restore your pages after a crash.

That's the way it must be done.
Another addition to that would be that, if OS already asked user if one want's to restore everything (if restoring was set automatic by the user in OS prefs, it must be possible that the restoring could be disabled, for example by holding down R button during reboot or from BOOT menu) , OS tells the application to restore, so that the user would not have 10 applications asking the same question.

IMO: A-eon would be smart if they could send one x1000 ASAP for Individual Computers to produce one or two example boards for xorro slot.
(like superb cheap (DIY possible) catweasel5)

Also Elbox might be interested.


UPDATE: I would like to have a 8 port atari joystic adapter + floppy drive port for Amiga HD floppies, thanks.

@ChrisH

I would like to have the option to launch Amiga games without real installation, because now it seems that we will have possibility to have 2Gb and more RAMdisk.

+ AOS could have a standard path/assign for game saves.

@kas1e

"But what about 5 copies of OWB, with opening pages and alt ? Will it saves too ?:) If it will be save everything just 1:1, and reboot will be no more than 5-10 seconds, then, it can be really good solution."

That is the idea.

The implementation works pretty well in latest Ubuntu.
If I have firefox running and I restart linux, I'll end up to the same situation that I was before the restart. (and I could have changed kernel etc. "on the fly") The problem with Linux is that it's slow. (not as slow as winXP, but anyway) AOS has the potential of being many times faster.

In the (partly my idea) OS just tells the application to quick save everything it was doing and after some delay (for example one second) the OS could tell the application to shut down, saves the information of what apps were running and after another second the OS tells disk I/O to stop and then reboots/powers off.

At the next start up, the OS can (optionally) ask the user what he/she wants. I the user wants to "restore", then the OS could start all apps that were running before shutdown/reboot. And the application checks it's "quicksave" information if it has data to restore for the user.

Everything must be configurable with good presets for Amiga newbies. (as usual)

************
In the future of MP AOS7, the OS could freeze applications separately (or suspend/hibernate like in Win) & save to disk, if so desired, then the restore would be close to atomic solution.

(untill we have MP I see no real use for hibernation, when quicksave+restore works faster and more reliable and it can be used after there's problem in the system (some app already crashed, potential wild pointer/memory corruption on the loose))

****************

@popetalk

Sorry, if I do not participate.

@ChrisH

After some program has crashed, the only safe thing to do (on a non-MP OS) is to reboot. (recommended also for all MP capable OSs)

For that I would like to have the shutdown&restart feature that restores all my running applications automatically after the reboot.
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/v ... 160&viewmode=flat&order=0

@kas1e

"i have 3 ports of modern and big games (and not only i),"

8-O

@DaveP

3. is the most important question.

I hope full xcore developer kit will be available with AOS4 SDK!

Confirmation please?



(IIRC, it requires JAVA !)

@Helgis

Picture of AOS4 (that has booted on the 64bit CPU of x1000) running the installer:
http://www.a-eon.com/pics/os4_on_x1000.jpg

So... At least some kind of temporary/optional MP (that breaks all old apps) would be wery welcome for SW developers to find FATAL bugs easier.

@Rigo

I was not suggesting any disassembly etc.

But there should be big enough (and fast) buffer of Amiga products (preferably preset & ready to run with basic SW bundle), then they could exist in mainstrem PC (web) shops, like the one I mentioned.