Tag Archives: network

New MultiMac NIC driver package (20170811) released

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

This package contains updated drivers to incorporate enhancements and fixes in the system libraries, including reliability and stability improvements, and message interrupt support.

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.

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

If you have ArcaOS, this driver package is available for download from the Arca Noae website as part of the Support & Maintenance subscription for your ArcaOS product. Please log into your account and see your ArcaOS order details page to access your software.

If you have an Arca Noae OS/2 & eCS Drivers and Software Subscription, 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.

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. It may also be a good time to consider moving up to ArcaOS.

Have an enterprise Windows XP application and can’t upgrade Windows?

Talk to us about the possibility of wrapping that Windows XP (or 2000 or even NT 4) app and running it under Odin32. Similar to running an application in a container under Linux, the application itself is the only thing running in a Windows-compatibility environment, while the rest of the system is not subject to Windows security vulnerabilities on the LAN or on the internet. In this configuration, the only user training required is getting the system booted, authenticating to the network, and clicking the program object to start the same Windows application with which your users are already familiar.

Have a Windows application which requires LAN transport, but the version of Windows now in use is too outmoded for the latest file transport security? No problem. Applications running under Odin32 on ArcaOS which need to access network shares may do so using the integrated Samba 4 networking in ArcaOS, which appears to the application to be a local drive. All authentication, security, and transport encryption (if so configured) happens at the ArcaOS level, outside the Windows environment.

Maintain your critical applications on OS/2, DOS, or 16 or 32-bit Windows, on modern hardware or virtualized, while running on a secure, stable, maintained platform: ArcaOS 5.

Note: Any application accessing the public internet may be at risk. ArcaOS itself cannot defend a Windows application running under it against such exploits, if that application is vulnerable to attack.

Want to learn more about using ArcaOS? Come to Warpstock 2017 in Toronto!

Warpstock as an event has been around since 1997. Since its inception, the goal of Warpstock has been to educate and expose users to OS/2, its available software, and how to get the most out of the environment. In addition, Warpstock has always been a great venue for meeting developers and engineers involved with OS/2 and its derivative operating systems, including eComStation and ArcaOS.

This year’s Warpstock event is scheduled for September 8-10 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Several key members of the ArcaOS development team will be on hand to present, answer questions, and take suggestions to improve the operating system as we continue to move toward the 5.1 release, planned for later next year.

More information about Warpstock, its history, past speakers and presentations, and this year’s event may be found on Warpstock’s site: http://www.warpstock.org.

Come join us in Toronto!

New AMouse driver package (3.01.02) 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:

XWP widget updates.
Installer fixes.

This release is 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.