GVP GURU ROM
Antony Alonso
in their Series II SCSI Controllers (A500 especially, but I imagine
A2000 just as well since they are virtually identical. Any help on
this matter, reviews, prejudice, infos, etc. *are* appreciated...
Keith Stewart
I just received mine today V6.10
It was well packaged and the manual is great especially the Q & A section
Installed OK and solved my devicedisk problems I was having with ShapeShifter.
Keith
Kirk Miller
: I'd like to hear from users that have installed the new GVP Guru ROM
: in their Series II SCSI Controllers (A500 especially, but I imagine
: A2000 just as well since they are virtually identical. Any help on
: this matter, reviews, prejudice, infos, etc. *are* appreciated...
I have a GVP 50 mhz with old roms in it, I would like some info on this
upgrade rom and will it work in a GVP A2000 50 mhz accel board? kirk
kami...@indirect.com
Greg Scott
>upgrade rom and will it work in a GVP A2000 50 mhz accel board? kirk
I have 2 on back order right now to test out. As soon as the distributor
gets them, then I get them, then I am going to try them out and see what
the hype is all about.
They would sell for around $109 Canadian.
--
Greg Scott ------------------------------------------------------------------
National Amiga - Amiga products and services!
1229 Marlborough Ct. Suite 1401 Oakville, Ontario, CANADA, L6H3B6
http://www.interlog.com/~gscott/NationalAmiga.html
Jeff Lindstrom
Kirk Miller <kami...@indirect.com> wrote:
>Antony Alonso (antony...@mgmtsys.com) wrote:
>: I'd like to hear from users that have installed the new GVP Guru ROM
>: in their Series II SCSI Controllers (A500 especially, but I imagine
>: A2000 just as well since they are virtually identical. Any help on
>: this matter, reviews, prejudice, infos, etc. *are* appreciated...
>I have a GVP 50 mhz with old roms in it, I would like some info on this
>upgrade rom and will it work in a GVP A2000 50 mhz accel board? kirk
I believe the 50 MHz 68030 accelerators for the 2000 had an IDE
controller on then, not the SCSI protocol used by the Series II cards.
--
Regards,
Jeff Lindstrom jeff...@netcom.com
Maciej P. Stasiowski
: I believe the 50 MHz 68030 accelerators for the 2000 had an IDE
You are wrong.
Both the 40mhz and 50mhz '030 GVP G-FORCE have SCSI-II controlers on-board.
MiKE
Greg Scott
>
>Both the 40mhz and 50mhz '030 GVP G-FORCE have SCSI-II controlers on-board.
Actually, you are kinda wrong too.
GVP had 3 50MHz 030 Cards:
The old A3001 Style with IDE
The newer Combo (same as 3001, just a better RAM board) still with IDE
Then the G-Force series with SCSI.
I could be wrong and the first two were the same one. But I used to have
a 50Mhz 3001 style card..
Jason Wong
: : I believe the 50 MHz 68030 accelerators for the 2000 had an IDE
: : controller on then, not the SCSI protocol used by the Series II cards.
: You are wrong.
: Both the 40mhz and 50mhz '030 GVP G-FORCE have SCSI-II controlers on-board.
Maybe not entirely wrong as the my manual mentions something about an OMNI-
rom which has both SCSI and IDE.
--
~===========================================================================~
Jason Wong - ja...@jaswong.demon.co.uk Gremlins Associates
Chinese DTP Specialists
~===========================================================================~
The older a man gets, the farther he had to walk to school as a boy.
Christian Ruf
Kirk Miller (kami...@indirect.com) wrote:
: Antony Alonso (antony...@mgmtsys.com) wrote:
: : I'd like to hear from users that have installed the new GVP Guru ROM
: : in their Series II SCSI Controllers (A500 especially, but I imagine
: : A2000 just as well since they are virtually identical. Any help on
: : this matter, reviews, prejudice, infos, etc. *are* appreciated...
I've got the Guru Rom V6 on my A2000B and GVP II+8 hostadapter.
: I have a GVP 50 mhz with old roms in it, I would like some info on this
: upgrade rom and will it work in a GVP A2000 50 mhz accel board?
It should, as on every board from the former GVP.
Well, before I had the Rom version 4.13, the latest one from GVP. With that I
had terrible Transer-Errors while Downloading directly on the HD, my Syquest
and my A3070 Streamer didn't run well at all and my 4 HD's gave all about
1.2mb/s. I must say that my A2000 has got an A2630 with 4 meg of Ram.
If the Guru Rom holds what it's supposed to do it should solve all my upper
problems - so I bought it...
But the illusion didn't last long :-/ The Transfers via serial port didn't run
better than before, still the same or even more errors. The Syquest run's
quite good, diskchanges work also, the A3070 didn't run better - but this is a
problem of the streamer itself but the new Diavolo will make it work anyway -
and my HDs went quite a bit faster, now at about 2mb/s.
So this would not be bad, but sice the installation I had lot's of sensless
crashes. I've changed the MASK as it was described in the good documentation,
but after I put the old ones back it worked a bit better. At the moment, a
month or so after the installation, I've still got sometimes these crashes,
but much less often, but sometimes files get corrupted while copying! This can
also be a problem of my Mask but noone could give me better settings than I've
got at the moment and these are: MASK: 0xfffffe Max-Transfer: 0x7fffffff
These are my expiriences, next week I'll get a CD-changer, I hope this will
work fine with the Guru Rom...
Greetings, Christian
--
(o o)
--------------------------------oOO--(_)--OOo--------------------------------
Christian Ruf AmiCall BBS : ++41-(0)1-980-4297
Chalenstr. 25 InterNet : r...@amc.helvetica.chnet.ch
CH-8123 Ebmatingen FidoNet : 2:301/722.0
FAX : ++41-(0)1-980-4297 AmigaNet : 39:110/506.0
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
urba...@ct.picker.com
>From: kami...@indirect.com (Kirk Miller)
>Subject: Re: GVP GURU ROM
>Date: 7 Jul 1995 06:03:36 GMT
>Antony Alonso (antony...@mgmtsys.com) wrote:
>: I'd like to hear from users that have installed the new GVP Guru ROM
>: in their Series II SCSI Controllers (A500 especially, but I imagine
>: A2000 just as well since they are virtually identical. Any help on
>: this matter, reviews, prejudice, infos, etc. *are* appreciated...
>I have a GVP 50 mhz with old roms in it, I would like some info on this
>upgrade rom and will it work in a GVP A2000 50 mhz accel board? kirk
>kami...@indirect.com
I received my GuruRom Friday.
Initial Impressions
A box, a disc, a well written manual
The disc contains some replacement files
for my existing stuff. Namely replacements
for GvpCPUCtrl, GvpSCSICtrl and a new
file OmniScsiCtrl.
As a bonus there are a few adverts some utilities
and a configured version of HDToolbox.
Last but not least some performance benchmarks.
and a performance utility.
My System:
A2000
GVP 030 50Mhz, 8M
Dataflyer Ram expansion 8M
Workbench 2.1
1G Hard drive
105 SyQuest
AmaxIV (4.008)
Retina 2 (2.3 software)
Nec 3xi CDRom
Installation
1.Just repalced the existing GVP Rom
and checked the jumpers reccommended by Ralph
2. Reinstalled AmCDROMfs with omniscsi.device as the device of choice.
3. Rebooted. The boot time seemed much longer.
4. Ran the Kludge files for AmaxIV
5. Launched AmaxIV.....
5a. Did some AmaxIV stuff to get the CD configured.
6. Voila... CD on my AmaxIV !
7. Played around with various CDs on Amax.
Things that worked
1. Demos from most manufacturers
Things that puked
1. Games
a. Microsoft Simulator
b. Spectre
8. Decided I should read the Manual
(I know ....but real engineers don't read manuals :)
The manual is well written and relatively easy to understand.
The manual explains each of the options for each of the commands.
The manual provides considerable discussion of strategies for
various configurations. All in all well done.
Whats not there...
Examples. It might be useful to have some examples of appropriate
configuration strategies. I would suggest that one or two (maybe three)
examples for various systems be included.
This would be useful for folks such as myself who have a limited understanding
of the Amigas architecture.
Which brings me to my questions (for Ralph or anyone else )
My goals are :
1. Fastest possible boot
2.Highest throughput to the 1G drive
My drives are configured as follows;
1. 1G drive is scsiID 6
2. SyQuest is scsiID 3
4. NEC drive is scsiID 4
My boot partition is on the 1G drive (DH0)
My Plan
1. Make the 1G drive the Last LUN
2. Enable the Synchronous Transfer Mode
Questions
1. Would it help to switch the scsi IDs around
i.e. make the 1G drive a lower number than the NEC
2. I would like the system to ignore the NEC at boot time
I am a bit unclear as to how to do this.
Things to do
Finish sorting out the boot sequence.
Run some benchmarks.
If anyone has any specific questions....
urba...@ct.picker.com
ED BARCIK
AA> I'd like to hear from users that have installed the new GVP Guru ROM in
AA> their Series II SCSI Controllers (A500 especially, but I imagine A2000
AA> just as well since they are virtually identical. Any help on this
AA> matter, reviews, prejudice, infos, etc. *are* appreciated...
You might read this over, I have ordered one of those roms but has
not arrived as yet.
============================================================================
#### # # #### # # #### ### # #
# # # # # # # # # # # ## ##
# ## # # #### # # ### #### # # # # #
# # # # # # # # # # # # # #
#### ### # # ### # # ### # #
omniscsi.device - GVP ROM module by Ralph Babel
A new device driver for all Series-II SCSI host adapters and
all turbo cards with a GVP SCSI host adapter.
Increasing requirements and a larger variety of available
SCSI devices made it necessary to rewrite the original GVP
device driver. In the previous driver versions, new program
portions would be added occasionally to solve problems that
existed with a few popular SCSI devices. Also, an
ever-increasing number of GVP products needed to be
supported in the driver.
In time, all of this resulted in considerable space
problems, which led to compromises in the development of the
driver, but it was nevertheless still possible to support
all of the current devices. Unfortunately, because of the
price war more and more manufacturers deviate from the SCSI
standard in their hardware and firmware or choose to save
money in certain areas. An example of this is certain CD-ROM
drives that no longer support PARITY.
The new OMNISCSI.DEVICE driver is a portable driver for all
Amigas and is first being made available for the most widely
used SCSI host adapter on the Amiga: the GVP Series-II. It
is faster and more reliable than all previous standard SCSI
device drivers, but nevertheless fully compatible to all
previously supported SCSI devices and then some.
With all of these extensions, however, the new device driver
no longer fits into the existing ROM area provided by the
Series-II. It was therefore combined with a ROM adapter that
allows up to four times as much address space as before to
be addressed.
- Which hardware is actually supported?
- Series-II SCSI host adapters with and without RAM option
for the A2000/A3000/A4000
- Series-II SCSI host adapter for the A500
- A530 turbo card for the A500
- Combo030 turbo cards for the A2000
- G-Force030 turbo cards for the A2000
- G-Force040 turbo card for the A2000
- A1208 SCSI host adapter for the A1200
- Will my system act exactly the same as before, after I
install the ROM module?
In essence, there is only a single incompatible change
that can be noted in your system: the name of the device
driver has changed. In the past, it would show up under
the name GVPSCSI.DEVICE; now it is called OMNISCSI.DEVICE.
- Is there a new GVPPATCH to prevent modem problems while
using DMA transfers?
The patch no longer exists in its original form, but has
instead been integrated into the control program
GVPSCSICTRL. It is actually needed for high-speed
transfers only.
- Do I get an even greater performance by using the B
version of the SCSI chip 33C93?
All known bugs in the internal processing of the 33C93 and
the 33C93A are worked around by the device driver.
Installing a 33C93B chip, which would be difficult in most
cases anyway because of the use of SMD mounting on most
GVP cards, is unnecessary.
One argument often used in favor of using the B version is
the support for FAST SCSI, but since the Zorro-II bus is
already at capacity with a throughput of 3.5 Mbytes/s, the
synchronous transfers of the A version of the 33C93 (max.
4.7 Mbytes/s) is more than sufficient.
- I have previousl changed. In the past, it would show up under
the name GVPSCSI.DEVICE; now it is called OMNISCSI.DEVICE.
- Is there a new GVPPATCH programs within which problems occurred with the
GVPSCSI.DEVICE. Because the driver adhered strictly to
Commodore's "Direct SCSI" standard, it revealed bugs in a
few incorrectly written programs. In both cases named
above, for example, the problem lay with the fact that a
particular flag (SCSIF_READ) was not being set, which is,
however, required by the above-mentioned standard. The new
OMNISCSI.DEVICE can be configured to work around such
problems.
- I want to transfer data on my hard disks in synchronous
mode. Is that possible?
Previously, it was only possible to write the appropriate
information into the RDB when a hard disk was prepped, but
the mode was not really used. With the new driver, the use
of SCSI devices in synchronous mode is finally possible.
- In the past, I always had to wait a long time for my
machine to start. Is it faster now?
The long delays are in part because of the SCSI protocol,
but there are ways to achieve a nearly instantaneous boot
of the computer from the system hard disk without
violating the SCSI specification. This has been taken into
consideration in the new driver.
- My A4000/040 doesn't support DMA to Chip RAM. Will that
present a problem with the use of the host adapter?
For this hardware problem of older revisions of the 68040
card used in the A4000, the driver provides an option that
prevents all DMA to Chip RAM, but which still permits
access to the rest of the Zorro-II area - such as on-board
RAM.
- Which SCSI peripherals are supported?
All SCSI devices we had access to were tested - current
and also some from our "museum" - including a number of
cartridge drives, CD-ROM drives, and streamers. In spite
of exhaustive testing, no problems were noted.
- Shouldn't a good SCSI driver support all SCSI devices
automatically?
Actually yes, but this isn't always "automatically"
possible. Each SCSI device includes its own SCSI
controller with its own firmware. It would be nice if
these were always free of bugs, but that is unfortunately
not always the case. This means that - if a problem can't
be resolved by switching off certain driver options -
sometimes the problem must be programmed around. This, of
course, is only then possible when the problem is known,
and is one of the reasons why from time to time new
revisions of the GVPSCSI.DEVICE were released. All
previously noted SCSI device firmware bugs have been taken
into consideration in the new driver.
- What other improvements does the new driver offer me?
- Data transfers have no restrictions, so that the optimum
values for the MOUNTLIST/RDB entries MASK, MAXTRANSFER,
and BUFMEMTYPE can be used. The driver itself decides
what the most efficient way for transferring data is
(DMA, buffered DMA, or PIO) and requires no workarounds
in the filesystem that would slow down transfers.
- Transfer mode and SCSI options like DISCONNECT,
SYNCHRONOUS, and PARITY can be configured individually
for each board or connected SCSI device, respectively.
This results in a much more comfortable configuration of
your system.
- The rescan command is now required only if a hard disk
partition (e.g. on a removable medium) must be mounted
after boot-up.
- An interesting new function makes it possible to
completely write-protect a medium, which blocks even
those commands that bypass the filesystem and talk
directly to the driver (HD_SCSICMD, CMD_WRITE,
TD_FORMAT). In this way for instance, the system drive
can be protected from any type of virus.
- The I/O Extender integrated in the G-Force040 is now
usable even if no SCSI drive is connected.
- Which data transfer rates are possible on my system?
Due to the multitude of possible GVP host adapters and the
virtually unlimited variety of SCSI devices and the
resulting combinations it is difficult to provide general
benchmarks for all situations. As an example, we have
selected a configuration that provides a typical
environment:
- A2000B revision 4.1 (PAL; the NTSC version is faster)
WITHOUT accelerator card or other accelerating
components
- Kickstart 37.175, Workbench 37.67
- 1 MB Chip RAM
- GVP Series-II SCSI host adapter populated with 2 MB of
Fast RAM
- Maxtor MXT 540 hard disk
There are three fundamentally different types of transfer
rates, all of which are used in reviews and advertising:
- Raw data transfer speed
The maximum data transfer rate of the host adapter is
limited by the Zorro-II bus only and can be as high as
3.5 Mbytes/s. The program RAWSCSISPEED measures the
values for READ BUFFER and WRITE BUFFER and provides a
good approximation of that particular maximum transfer
rate. In the test system, values of approximately 3.4
Mbytes/s were measured for both reading and writing.
- Transfer rate at the device-driver level
This transfer speed can be measured with the program
SCSISPEED (FF665). Unlike with RAWSCSISPEED, here the
time required for the interpretation of the commands,
among other things, _is_ taken into account. For a
256-Kbyte buffer, a value of 3.1 Mbytes/s was measured.
It dropped to 2.6 Mbytes/s when SCSISPEED also evaluated
the amount of available CPU time. This was reported as
79%; thus according to the results of SCSISPEED, the
load on the CPU from the driver is only 21%.
- Transfer rate at the filesystem level
Using the program DISKSPEED (also on FF665), the data
transfer rate can be measured at the DOS level. The
resulting values are strongly dependent on the
filesystem used, the block size, the buffers,
fragmentation of the hard disk, and other factors, so
that here only limited conclusions can be drawn about
the speed of the host adapter and its device driver. In
spite of that, measurements were made. On an empty
partition that was placed on the outer tracks of the
hard disk (with a logical block size of 512 bytes),
DISKSPEED showed a result of 2.4 Mbytes/s both during
reads and writes of 256-Kbyte blocks in the above
configuration.
Once again as a reminder: all of the above values apply to
a pure 68000-based system in a minimal configuration.
- And what about SCSI-2?
The new driver completely conforms to SCSI-2. Existing GVP
SCSI host adapters, however, do not provide terminator
power (TERMPWR), which is optional in SCSI-1 only. All of
the differences between SCSI-1, CCS, and SCSI-2 are
handled transparently by the driver though, and do not
affect normal operation. The SCSI bus itself remains 8
bits wide, of course, and doesn't support FAST or WIDE
transfers, two of the new options under SCSI-2, but the
new OMNISCSI.DEVICE pushes the Zorro-II bus to its limits
anyway. Because of that, the use of SCSI-2 devices in
general poses no problem.
===========================================================
Ed Barcik in Cleveland, OH at ed.b...@amcom.com
... Feminism is simply the radical notion that women are people.
* Q-Blue 2.0 *
William Gazecki
>
>Antony Alonso (antony...@mgmtsys.com) wrote:
>: I'd like to hear from users that have installed the new GVP Guru ROM
>: in their Series II SCSI Controllers (A500 especially, but I imagine
>: A2000 just as well since they are virtually identical. Any help on
>: this matter, reviews, prejudice, infos, etc. *are* appreciated...
I just finished installing the GURU ROM in my 2000 w/ 030/33 combo
board. Seems to be working very well. Diskspeed reportlooks best
yet. Took awhile to install completely. Must read entire manual
very carefully. Prompts from SW helped a lot. All in all
quite worth the trouble.
Ralph Babel
> Rebooted. The boot time seemed much longer.
C'mon, read at least the _FAQ_ chapter:
rdbCtrl 6 LastDisk
(See sections 1.6.4, 2.3.12, and 3.5.)
> The manual is well written and relatively easy to understand.
> The manual explains each of the options for each of the commands.
> The manual provides considerable discussion of strategies for
> various configurations. All in all well done.
Thanks.
> Make the 1G drive the Last LUN
Huh? This doesn't make any sense.
> Enable the Synchronous Transfer Mode
OmniScsiCtrl 6 Synchronous
(See sections 1.6.3, 2.3.8, and 2.5.4.)
> I would like the system to ignore the NEC at boot time
What do you mean by "ignore", and what are you trying to
achieve this way?
Carlos Amezaga
: I'd like to hear from users that have installed the new GVP Guru ROM
: in their Series II SCSI Controllers (A500 especially, but I imagine
: A2000 just as well since they are virtually identical. Any help on
: this matter, reviews, prejudice, infos, etc. *are* appreciated...
:
I installed the GURU Rom on my GVP A530 and I do notice a slight increase
in speed as well as all those pesky transfer errors have gone away thanks to
an updated Serial Patch which works with the GuruRom. I can now transfer
files at 3700CPS without receiving a single error at 28,800. Before I would
get errors if I got anywhere near 2000CPS. My CD-ROM seems to be having less
problems as well. I am more than happy with my GURU Rom.
Carlos