Tag Archives: driver

Panorama Video Driver Package version 1.08 released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our Panorama Video Driver Package for OS/2 and eComStation version 1.08.

This is a maintenance release containing the following changes:

Removed some WarpIN installer restrictions.
Added setup WPS class to package.
Enhanced UseNativeRes functionality.
Fixed installer to work on ArcaOS installations.
Added test so that driver will not report resolutions or attempt
to use video memory above that reported by the BIOS.

This release is exactly the same driver that is included in ArcaOS 5.0. If you recently purchased a license for ArcaOS 5.0, it is not necessary to download and install this package — you already have it.

This driver package is available for download from the Arca Noae website as part of your Arca Noae OS/2 & eCS Drivers and Software Subscription. Please log into your account in order to access your software.

More information about the Panorama Package may be found in the Panorama wiki.

If you are still running OS/2 and/or eComStation systems and haven’t yet purchased a software subscription, this is a great reason to do so now.

New MultiMac NIC driver package (20161204) released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new release of our MultiMac NIC driver package.

This package contains rebuilt drivers to incorporate some SMP related fixes in the system libraries. Even though the actual driver code has not been changed in any of the drivers, all the drivers were rebuilt to incorporate the new system libraries. All of the 32 bit drivers are affected.

Note that when you install this package, one of the drivers is marked as untested (MMSK) and is not automatically selected for installation. This means that the developer does not have the hardware to test this driver and could not get someone to test it. If you want to use this driver, you must select it on the packages page of the installer. If you use this driver and would like to become the official tester for it, please see the info section of the .txt file for the driver (MMSK.txt) after installation, or the ReadMe on the wiki.

As always, please read the .txt file that comes with each driver and also provided on the wiki. If you have problems with any of the drivers in this release, please read the Debugging Guide in the wiki first. If your problem cannot be resolved with the Debugging Guide, then the problem should be reported to the ticketing system. Simply log in with your Arca Noae credentials, select MultiMac from the list of projects, and open a ticket.

This driver package is available for download from the Arca Noae website as part of your Arca Noae OS/2 & eCS drivers and software package subscription. Please log into your account in order to access your software.

If you haven’t yet purchased a software subscription, this is a great reason to do so now.

More information about the MultiMac NIC drivers may be found in the wiki.

New AMouse driver package (3.01.01) released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new release of our AMouse driver package.

This package contains the following updates:

The XWP widget is now included.
Misc minor bug fixes.

Please read the ReadMe.txt file that comes with this package and also provided on the wiki. If you have problems with this software, please report the problem in the ticketing system. Simply log in with your Arca Noae credentials, select AMouse from the list of projects, and open a ticket.

If you haven’t yet purchased a software subscription, this is a great reason to do so now.

More information about the AMouse driver may be found in the wiki.

New MultiMac NIC driver package (20161008) released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new release of our MultiMac NIC driver package.

This release is a refresh of the 20161005 package. There was a problem in the system library which affected all drivers in the package. If you previously installed the 20161005 package, you are strongly encouraged to download and install this package to update your drivers.

This package is just a refresh of the 20161005 release so the information for that release is the same for this one and is repeated here:

An updated E1000B driver.
An updated MMALE driver.
An updated MMLEM driver.
An updated MMRE driver.
An updated MMAE driver.
An updated MMALC driver.
A new MMIGB driver for older Intel NICs.
A new MMSK driver for SysKonnect SK-NET NICs.
All the other drivers are not changed at all. In fact, they are the same files that were distributed in the last release simply copied into this current release for convenience.

Note that when you install this package, four of the drivers are marked as untested (MMAE, MMALC, MMIGB, MMSK) and are not automatically selected for installation. This means that the developer does not have the hardware to test these drivers and could not get someone to test them. If you want to use these drivers, you must select them on the packages page of the installer. If you use one of these four drivers and would like to become the official tester for it, please see the info section of the .txt file for the driver (mmae.txt for example) after installation, or the ReadMe on the wiki.

If you haven’t yet purchased a software subscription, this is a great reason to do so now.

More information about the MultiMac NIC drivers may be found in the wiki.

New MultiMac NIC driver package (20161005) released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new release of our MultiMac NIC driver package.

More information about the MultiMac NIC drivers may be found in the wiki.

New in this release:

An updated E1000B driver.
An updated MMALE driver.
An updated MMLEM driver.
An updated MMRE driver.
An updated MMAE driver.
An updated MMALC driver.
A new MMIGB driver for older Intel NICs.
A new MMSK driver for SysKonnect SK-NET NICs.
All the other drivers are not changed at all. In fact, they are the same files that were distributed in the last release simply copied into this current release for convenience.

If you haven’t yet purchased a software subscription, this is a great reason to do so now.

How’s your NetDrive?

NetDrive for OS/2 is an essential connectivity tool for OS/2 and derivative operating systems, including eComStation. This week, NetDrive 3.1.5 has been released, addressing a couple minor issues and enabling the use of the updated plugin for SFTP connections, now available from the Arca Noae store. NetDrive 3.1.5 is a free upgrade for existing NetDrive 3 licensees.

You may purchase new or additional licenses for NetDrive and a number of commercial plugins from our store.

Arca Noae needs your help

In order to make the installation of Blue Lion as smooth and intuitive as possible, we need to update and maintain an extensive database of hardware we are likely to encounter during installation and the drivers associated with the various devices installed in current machines.

Luckily, during the installation of eComStation, a file is created: MACHINE.CFG, stored in <boot drive>\ecs\install\rsp. This file contains all of the relevant data we need to update our current database.

We are asking for community assistance to gather as many MACHINE.CFG files as possible. If you have installed eComStation systems, please attach the MACHINE.CFG file from each one to an email (you may attach multiple files to a single email or send separate ones) addressed to hardware-info at arcanoae dot com. This file should not contain any personally identifiable information, but to be sure, please review before attaching.

Many thanks from the Blue Lion Dev Team for your assistance!

Convenience of shutdown/poweroff in a virtual machine

At one time, shutting down an OS/2 guest under VirtualBox meant full shutdown and virtual powerdown. With recent versions of VirtualBox (5.x), however, this has not been the case.

We’ve noticed, and we’ve done some work to address this.

Did you know that Arca Noae’s ACPI driver runs just fine under these latest builds of VirtualBox? Using the ACPI driver, it is possible to configure the OS/2 (or eComStation) guest machine for complete poweroff using ACPI, just as you might configure a physical workstation.

If you’ve thought that the Arca Noae Drivers and Software subscription didn’t bring value to your virtual OS/2 experience, think again. Now is a great time to subscribe.

Dramatically improve your virtual machine’s network performance

Current VirtualBox recommendations are to use the virtual Intel network cards for guest machines and to configure for bridged networking. Until now, the only choice for OS/2 was the older, IBM-supplied, Intel E1000 driver. The result? Performance just slightly better than the default AMD PCnet-FAST III virtual adapter.

Now, however, there is a choice. Arca Noae subscribers may use the all-new MultiMac Legacy EM driver (MMLEM). This driver is a breakthrough for virtual machines running under VirtualBox, with performance measured at more than twice the throughput of the older driver.

Some comparisons from netio 1.3 across a 1Gbps unmanaged switch, from an OS/2 VM running the latest 32-bit TCP/IP stack to a 64-bit Linux server running on bare metal¹:

E1000:

TCP connection established.
Packet size  1k bytes:  15.04 MByte/s Tx,  9168.71 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size  2k bytes:  19.64 MByte/s Tx,  11.99 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size  4k bytes:  22.38 MByte/s Tx,  13.58 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size  8k bytes:  23.72 MByte/s Tx,  17.62 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size 16k bytes:  24.83 MByte/s Tx,  20.62 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size 32k bytes:  19.52 MByte/s Tx,  17.82 MByte/s Rx.
Done.

MMLEM:

TCP connection established.
Packet size  1k bytes:  13.19 MByte/s Tx,  9183.80 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size  2k bytes:  18.65 MByte/s Tx,  12.20 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size  4k bytes:  27.93 MByte/s Tx,  14.98 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size  8k bytes:  39.91 MByte/s Tx,  19.29 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size 16k bytes:  50.39 MByte/s Tx,  22.74 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size 32k bytes:  28.07 MByte/s Tx,  19.19 MByte/s Rx.
Done.

(Note that the falloff between 16 and 32k appears to be an issue within VirtualBox itself, as the same tests, when run against the host machine, actually report an improvement in throughput for the 32k packet size over the 16k one. A 32-bit Linux guest does not show this falloff.)

As you can see, peak transmit throughput, using 16k byte packets, went from 24.83MByte/s (198.64Mbps) to 50.39MByte/s (403.12Mbps). If you are transferring large files across your network to and from your OS/2 VM, this implies a possible reduction in the amount of time it takes for such transfers by more than one half².

In addition, while the above tests were run using the Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM) virtual network card in the guest, the MMLEM driver also supports the Intel PRO/1000 T Server (82543GC) and Intel PRO/1000 MT Server (82545EM) virtual network card options available in VirtualBox 5.x, either of which may yield even better throughput (the older IBM-supplied driver does not support these server-class cards).

There are other benefits of the Arca Noae Drivers & Software subscription for virtualized users of OS/2, including full shut down and virtual power off of the VM when using Arca Noae’s ACPI PSD. So if you thought there wasn’t much value in subscribing just to run virtual machines, you might want to look again.

Guest machine running eCS 2.1, configured with 2GB RAM, Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM) virtual network card, 32-bit TCP/IP stack, default sockets. Host machine running openSUSE LEAP 42.1 x64, 16GB RAM, single Intel 82567LF-2 onboard network adapter, and default adapter settings. NETIO target (host) machine running openSUSE 13.2 x64, 32GB RAM, dual Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 onboard network adapters, in bonded active backup configuration, with default adapter settings for the physical bond slaves. Switch was Cisco SR2024 (unmanaged 10/100/1000).
Many factors contribute to overall network throughput, including protocol, aggregate traffic, CPU activity, etc. These figures are meant as a guideline and not a guaranty of performance.

Blue Lion in the news

It’s happened again… We’ve been slashdotted…

It all started when James Sanders wrote this piece in Tech Republic, which among other bits of Blue Lion news, correctly reported the official product name of Blue Lion as ArcaOS 5.0.

As was to be expected, this news took on a life of its own, and pretty soon, we were slashdotted.

Try a quick web search for “ArcaOS 5.0” and you’ll see what we mean…

Some of the comments which follow these articles can be quite humorous. Many people have fond memories of OS/2 (2.0? 3?), but have never had an opportunity to run it on modern hardware or even on a gigabit LAN, nor have they had the experience of running modern software on the platform, such as Firefox 38.8.0 ESR or Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2. (Both of these current applications have been ported and made possible on the OS/2 platform by our good friends and strategic partners, bww bitwise works, GmbH. You may find more great stuff from bitwise in our store.) For those of you who do take the time to post and respond in these venues, our heartfelt thanks for updating some of the users who seem a little out of step.

Of course, there are some great comments by well-respected people in the tech arena, like Brian Proffit and Brian J Dooley (thanks, guys).

Whatever your preferred language, enjoy the read, and be sure to add your own comments, including your more recent experience with OS/2 and the difference modern drivers and software make.