The other day I upgraded a VirtualBox installation to version
5.0.14r105127 and just tried to boot a Coherent floppy disk image.
Much to my surprise the VM didn't crash and the install procedure
continued.

I haven't tried a complete install yet because I'm busy with other
things, just wanted to let you know. I would expect it installs
and runs OK now in this VM, go figure.

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Udo Munk <[email protected]> wrote:
<snip>

Well, hope that get you started, happy hacking.

Thanks for the info, will give it a try

John

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Quick update, because I was very curious I installed 4.10.
Just installs, runs fast like hell, way back then I've not
had such a fast Coherent system :)

Thanks to someone @ Oracle.

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W dniu 2016-01-27 o 22:18, Udo Munk pisze:

Quick update, because I was very curious I installed 4.10.
Just installs, runs fast like hell, way back then I've not
had such a fast Coherent system :)

Thanks to someone @ Oracle.

I can confirm , it works for me too.
Performance comparable to 4.2.28 I recently used.
But the big number of bug fixes in 5.x since 4.2.x makes the switch to
5.x a MUST.

Andrzej

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W dniu 2016-02-05 o 12:43, Udo Munk pisze:

BTW on native systems I use BOOTIT from

Yep, one can use something like that. I remember that I worked
with some LILO or grub guys and modified the Coherent boot code,

Never seen.
But I have never suceeded to boot from LILO or grub either.
It would be really valuable to have this modified Coherent boot code .

Bootit not only works, it supports Coherent explicitly, in the sense
that the name of Coherent partition is mentioned in the list of
avalaible partition types. And of course bootit is much more powerful
than grub.
I had once email contact with them. One of the guys used Coherent in the
past :)

And IMAGE from the same company is a very good tool for backups, all my Coherent backups are done now with it.

Apropos ddk, I didn't find one other than for 3.2. If someone has

It is strange , that it is not in Steve archive, I thought it is there
too. I have of course images , which work fine in virtualbox .
I will ask Steve and eventually he could add to his archive.

Andrzej

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W dniu 2016-02-02 o 20:48, Udo Munk pisze:

Create an IDE harddisk not larger than 500 MB to avoid any problems.
Install the 4.2.10 distribution disks from Steve's Coherent archive.
I have partitioned the 500 MB disk as follows:

root: fdisk /dev/at0x

Best choice during installation.

But good news for those interested is that Steve archive contains also
the last version of fdisk, supporting drives and partitions larger than
500 MB. You have to build it from sources. As a result You will be able
to use 8GB drive with four 2 GB partitions etc.
One could eventually add it to the installation distribution.
Once You have it You can create second harddrive 8GB in Virtualbox and
add partitions

fdisk /dev/at1x

BTW on native systems I use BOOTIT from

https://www.terabyteunlimited.com/company.htm

This program will let you change partition information for each disk drive.

All over the net you'll find more or less unusable installations
on broken VM's working very slow. That often is attributed to
Coherent and it's crappy filesystem/fsck, which is nonsense.

Yes , it is true. Coherent fsck is amazing. Even on my experimental 64
bit filesystem, with 80GB partion , fsck still works. 80-100 GB seems to
be a experimental limit. mkfs is still better . it can make even greater filesystems. But without fsck I would not use such system.

The filesystem is crufty and lacks many features of modern filesystems
of course. But a filesystem that was written for mini's like PDP-11,
Z8000, 286/386 should be very fast on modern 64bit hardware, right?

Well,
IO speed depends on so many factors . In case of Coherent the true
bottleneck is small amount of IO buffer pool in kernel, about <= 2 MB.
At present it is impossible to increase it without rewrite of kernel.

Another limitations is 512 byte blocksize and buffersize.
Linux uses 1024 as a default , at least in older systems. And newest
terabyte drives support 4096 .
I thought many times to increase block size to 1024. It should work
after rebuilding everything from sources .??? Perhaps one could do it a
tunable value in mtune ??

BTW , I have once noticed this already in this group. Namely simple optimisation is to change 16 bit writes/reads in at driver into 32 bit
ones. You need to install ddk to get it right.
I do not know if it increases the speed in Virtualbox, but in native
system the speedup is about 2 (as measured by Bonnie).

Andrzej

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W dniu 2016-02-08 o 18:53, Udo Munk pisze:

Even X11R5 from MWC runs, interesting. Should be possible to build
a pretty complete development box, as we used them in the 90th.

But probably VGA server with 640/480 16 colors only?
Or something better ?

I have tested many different cards (Cirrus, Trident, Ati,Tseng(?),S3(?)
) on native system in the past, but got only above mentioned mode working. There was mentioned some special ATI card, allowing for 800x600 mode.



Andrzej

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On Tuesday, February 9, 2016 at 11:46:04 AM UTC+1, Udo Munk wrote:

I had systems with VESA S3 and ATI cards that worked with 1024*768 in
256 color mode. As far as I know Virtualbox emulates a generic SVGA
card, so that might be possible with the proper configuration.

Nope, the Virtualbox VGA emulation doesn't emulate any chipset
this old XFree server has drivers for. So best one can get with
this is 800*600 monochrome. Well, better than nothing, amazing
that these bits from 1993 run at all.

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W dniu 2016-02-09 o 14:10, Udo Munk pisze:

On Tuesday, February 9, 2016 at 11:46:04 AM UTC+1, Udo Munk wrote:

I had systems with VESA S3 and ATI cards that worked with 1024*768 in
256 color mode. As far as I know Virtualbox emulates a generic SVGA
card, so that might be possible with the proper configuration.

Nope, the Virtualbox VGA emulation doesn't emulate any chipset
this old XFree server has drivers for. So best one can get with
this is 800*600 monochrome. Well, better than nothing, amazing
that these bits from 1993 run at all.

Exactly. I have just checked the X installer and it contains


VGA=vga256
case $CHIPSET in
et3000) /bin/echo Chipset: Tseng Labs ET3000 ;;
et4000) /bin/echo Chipset: Tseng Labs ET4000 ;;
ati) /bin/echo Chipset: ATI 18800 or ATI 28800 ;;
gvga) /bin/echo Chipset: Genoa GVGA ;;
pvga1) /bin/echo Chipset: Paradise VGA PVGA1A ;;
tvga8900c) /bin/echo Chipset: Trident TVGA8900C ;;
tvga9000) /bin/echo Chipset: Trident TVGA9000 ;;
*) /bin/echo Chipset: Unknown chipset ;
VGA=vga2 ;;
esac

So the generic SVGA server would have to understand(=have drivers) how
to speak(communicate) with above cards .

Andrzej

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W dniu 2016-02-09 o 14:23, andrzej Popielewicz pisze:

So the generic SVGA server would have to understand(=have drivers) how
to speak(communicate) with above cards .

No,sorry.

The emulation of SVGA in Virtual would have to understand the calls of
the Coherent X-server , which in itself assumes it speaks to the
corresponding card .
And as You mentioned , it is not the case now.

The only solution to improve the situation is probably to try to add
capability to use 16 colors . XF86_VGA16 server is mentioned in
xfree.faq-1 Coherent docs. It is job for those who have sources of
original MWC X distribution .:)

It seems , that Coherent X-server supports only Mono or 256 colors.

Andrzej

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On Tuesday, February 9, 2016 at 2:53:11 PM UTC+1, andrzej Popielewicz wrote:

Yep, that are the drivers included, you also can check with:

udo@alien:/home/udo> X386color -showconfig
XFree86 Version 1.2 RTR / X Window System
(protocol Version 11, revision 0, vendor release 5000)
Configured drivers:
VGA256 (256 colour SVGA):
et4000, et3000, pvga1, gvga, ati, tvga8900c, tvga9000 udo@alien:/home/udo>

Virtualbox doesn't emulate any of these, so 256 color server can't
be used.

At MWC I had the sources from RTR of course, we were modifying several
things. Is not in Steve's archives, maybe RTR still have it, don't
know.

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Udo Munk pisze:

At MWC I had the sources from RTR of course, we were modifying several things. Is not in Steve's archives, maybe RTR still have it, don't
know.

I have contacted them some years ago. They had it .
But wanted some hundreds of dollars for recovering it from archives,
and could not estimate how many hundreds it really finally will be, so I
have given up. :)


Andrzej

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Here some infos for Coherent wannabe-hackers how to get an
acceptable workstation for that. Get Oracle VirtualBox, a
5.something release. Create a 32 bit virtual machine and switch
anything related to virtualization OFF! The lastest Coherent bits
are from 1995, while stuff like Intel VT, IO-APIC and such came
later. Also switch para-virtualatization to none, is not possible
to install vbox-tools. Use PIIX3 chipset for mainboard and IDE
controller, PIIX4 seems to work too, but any later won't.

You want to enable the tty ports so that you can telnet into
the Coherent VM, no copy/paste from the console window without
vbox tools of course. Details for that in the manuals, works,
used that for copy/paste of the session stuff below.

Create an IDE harddisk not larger than 500 MB to avoid any problems.
Install the 4.2.10 distribution disks from Steve's Coherent archive.
I have partitioned the 500 MB disk as follows:

root: fdisk /dev/at0x

This program will let you change partition information for each disk drive.
A disk drive can be divided into one to four logical partitions.
You can change the active partition (the partition which your
system boots by default) or change the layout of logical partitions.
Other programs which change hard disk partition information
may list logical partitions in a different order.
Hit <Esc><Enter> to return to the main menu at any time.
Now hit <Enter>.
Drive 0 currently has the following logical partitions:
[ In Cylinders ] [ In Tracks ]
Number Type Start End Size Start End Size Mbytes Blocks Name
0 Boot Coherent 0 193 194 1 3103 3103 100.09 195489 /dev/at0a 1 Coherent 194 290 97 3104 4655 1552 50.06 97776 /dev/at0b 2 Coherent 291 678 388 4656 10863 6208 200.25 391104 /dev/at0c 3 <Unused> 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.00 0 /dev/at0d 5360 tracks (172.89 megabytes) are unused starting at track 10864.

Possible actions:
0 = Quit
1 = Change active partition (or make no partition active)
2 = Change one logical partition
3 = Change all logical partitions
4 = Delete one logical partition
5 = Change drive characteristics
6 = Display drive information
Action [0]?

Partition 0 is the root filesystem, 1 is mounted at /home and 2
is mounted at /u1, good enough to get you started:

root: df -v
Mount Dir Filesystem blocks used free %used
/ (/dev/root ): 195489 31985 163504 16.3% /home (/dev/home ): 97776 1758 96018 1.7% /u1 (/dev/u1 ): 391104 6994 384110 1.7% root:

All over the net you'll find more or less unusable installations
on broken VM's working very slow. That often is attributed to
Coherent and it's crappy filesystem/fsck, which is nonsense.
The filesystem is crufty and lacks many features of modern filesystems
of course. But a filesystem that was written for mini's like PDP-11,
Z8000, 286/386 should be very fast on modern 64bit hardware, right?

root: time fsck /dev/root
/dev/root:
/dev/root mounted on / as of Mon Feb 2 20:06:57 1970
Phase 1 : Check Blocks and Sizes
Phase 2 : Check Pathnames
Phase 3 : Check Connectivity
Phase 4 : Check Reference Counts
Phase 5 : Check Free List
3593 files 28492 blocks 163504 free
Real: 0.4
User: 0.1
Sys: 0.2
root:


root: time fsck /dev/u1
/dev/u1:
/dev/u1 mounted on /u1 as of Mon Feb 2 20:06:57 1970
Phase 1 : Check Blocks and Sizes
Phase 2 : Check Pathnames
Phase 3 : Check Connectivity
Phase 4 : Check Reference Counts
Phase 5 : Check Free List
5 files 8 blocks 384110 free
Real: 0.8
User: 0.2
Sys: 0.5
root:

In the 90th I was using pretty decent SCSI hardware with my
systems and the performance was OK. This VM box is the fastest
Coherent system I have ever seen, just don't run it on
crappy/unappropriate hardware.

Well, hope that get you started, happy hacking.

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