Re: Memory upgrades for Zorro3 Amiga buildds
On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 10:20:36PM +0200, Ingo J?rgensmann wrote:
> Am 23.06.2013 um 21:34 schrieb John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>:
>
> > Since the turbo boards used in our Amigas cannot be usually upgraded
> > to more than 128MB, we can't usually get more memory than that.
> > However, there is one possibility which is the BigRAMPlus card
> > with 256 MB FastRAM made by Individual Computers.
> >
> > The board costs just 99 Euros and is guaranteed to work in all
> > original Amiga Zorro-III boards, it might cause trouble in third
> > party bus board like the Mikronik board elgar is using.
>
> Currently we have these machines listed in the Buildd.Net database:
>
> buildd=# select arch, name, model, cpu from status where arch='m68k' and model like 'Amiga%';
> arch | name | model | cpu
> ------+----------+--------------+----------
> m68k | arrakis | Amiga 3000 | 68060/50
> m68k | vault13 | Amiga 1200 | 68060/50
> m68k | crest | Amiga 4000 | 68060/50
> m68k | aahz | Amiga 2000 | 68060/50
> m68k | akire | Amiga 2000 | 68060/50
> m68k | elgar | Amiga 4000 | 68060/50
> m68k | kullervo | Amiga 3000UX | 68060/50
> m68k | vivaldi | Amiga 4000T | 68060/50
> m68k | spice | Amiga 3000 | 68040/40
> (9 rows)
>
> So, this makes arrakis, crest, aahz, elgar, kullervo, vivaldi and spice suitable for the BigRamPlus with the note that elgar and crest are Mikronik tower case where we don't know whether BRP will work.
aahz is an A2k with ZorroII only, so I guess it can not work there. But I
have another A3k, without any turboboard or network card (though I read that
Jens is designing a 100Mbit card...).
> It should be noted as well that, although the BRP will work in those hosts, the memory will have a maximum throughput of 12-14 MB/s which is significantly slower than the 40-60 MB/s you'll usually get from the memory directly attached to the accelerator cards. But it will be faster than any disk access (swapping).
>
> I guess we will need memfiles at boot time as well, as (as far as I can tell) the kernel usually makes use of the memory chunk with the highest priority (accel card mem is at priority 40, normal FastRAM on Amiga motherboard is at priority 10).
>
> But after all the BigRamPlus expansion will be a benefit and give the buildds a fairly good boost. It will be worth the money, I think - if it works.
>
> > For that matter, I have been in contact with Jens Schoenfeld
> > (the guy who designed the hardware) and he offered me to sell
> > us the boards directly, delivering the first one with an extended
> > money back guarantee. Thus, one of us buys one board and we can
> > extensively test it in all of the buildds (shipping it around
> > to the various buildd locations).
> >
> > If the RAM card turns out to be useful, we can order one for
> > every Amiga where it works, otherwise we can just send it
> > back and get our money back.
> >
> > What do you guys think?
>
> I think we should go for it. Can you buy one card, test it in Elgar and send it to Christian so he could test it in Kullervo? He could test the card in Crest as well.
> Arrakis and Vivaldi will have to wait until I will travel to Osnabrueck again, but I'm fairly optimistic that it will work there as both machines are real Z3-Amigas.
Sounds like a plan, but I have some doubts that the Debian project will
reimburse us for this. According the the current rules, m68k will never be
able to qualify as a release architecture (no new hardware, no support, but
you said you can control your Amiga via serial console?)
Christian
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