Running OS/2 under Virtualbox

[reiknir]

OS/2 runs fine on VB 30x
Make sure you do not enable nested pageing and make sure that you install gengradd before you install the vboxadditions
if you use something older than ecomstation or 452 download an updated gengradd

[TrevorPH]

Does anyone have a USB attached hard disk working with newer versions of VirtualBox? I have tried every release of VB from 2.0.6 onwards until 3.0.6 and none of them will allow a USB hard disk to be attached to an OS/2 guest. I am using Centos 5 as a host and I have everything set up correctly so that it works perfectly with VirtualBox 2.0.4. As soon as I install any newer release of VB from 2.0.6 onwards then the lvm /rediscoverprm fails to work - just hangs forever or returns after an hour or two but no disk is visible.

I raised bug #2850 about this 9 months ago and it's never been taken out of 'new' status so it looks to me like no one from the VB team has even looked at it. http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2850

I've taken a copy of the OS/2 boot disk and put it on a Windows XP host and it works there. So if you're successful on Windows then, yes, so am I! But I don't want to run this on Windows, my big machine is a Linux box and that's where I have cpu resources/RAM etc to be able to run a guest VM.

[ingo2]

USBMSD doesn't work here either (Warp4+, with latest drivers and kernel 104a_UNI). I myself don't bother because I perform all data exchange via nfs. Have set up an nfs-server in OS/2 and comfortably mount any export in Linux - by far easier and faster than USB.

Ingo

[TrevorPH]

USBMSD doesn't work here either (Warp4+, with latest drivers and kernel 104a_UNI). I myself don't bother because I perform all data exchange via nfs. Have set up an nfs-server in OS/2 and comfortably mount any export in Linux - by far easier and faster than USB.

Ingo

After making my last post, the ticket was opened by some helpful Sun people and they've been looking at this. My latest experiment has finally got USB hard drives working on VBox 3.0.8. It seems that it stopped working after a change went in in 2.0.6 to fix an iPhone issue. I went off and read those tickets about that issue and found that several people had already got their iPhone to work by recompiling the linux kernel and changing a #define in the source to increase a USB buffer from 16KB to 128KB. On the offchance that it might similarly affect OS/2, I recompiled kernel 2.6.31.1 with that define and my USB hard drives started to work on VBox 3.0.8.

I have also discovered that it seems that you have to use a magic incantation of different drivers to make OS/2 USB work at all! I have os2krnl 14.104a SMP version with the other required SMP files. I have acpi.psd 3.x (not sure that the release of this makes much difference and it also requires the version of resource.sys that is shipped with the acpi distribution. I'm also using a virtual Intel 1000MT ethernet card and have got that set up on the 2nd ethernet port - not sure if that was required but I noticed that it moved it from sharing an IRQ with something else to getting one of its own.

If you want to use usbohcd.sys then it cannot be 10.162 as this locks the boot up when it loads. We found that backleveling this to 10.084 or 10.070 fixed the lockup. There may be intermediate versions of usbohcd.sys that work too but those were the only ones we had. All other usb drivers are 10.162 level.

Having said all that, I've had to back out 3.0.8 because my OS/2 system just wasn't stable enough when running under it. Random reboots and lockups that don't happen under 2.0.4 - and the video redraw is miles too slow on 3.0.8. When time permits I will do some more experimentation with OS/2 video drivers and see if they make a difference to this - currently I am using SNAP 3.1.8 at 1600x1200x65536@85Hz.

[marten]

OS/2 runs fine on VB 30x
Make sure you do not enable nested pageing and make sure that you install gengradd before you install the vboxadditions
if you use something older than ecomstation or 452 download an updated gengradd

I'm running it under Ubunut 9.04/64 with VB 308 and eCom RC7 - actually installation was fine, SNAP as video driver and JFS as file system. Soundblaster 16 and PCnet-FASTIII (NAT) - and the stuff is working, BUT the system freezes more or less often - espcially when I do lots of file accessing. As an example the installation of OpenOffice 3.1.1 always freezes the system during installation and also storing a large image file (>12 MB) also freezes the system pretty often.

[TrevorPH]

OS/2 runs fine on VB 30x
Make sure you do not enable nested pageing and make sure that you install gengradd before you install the vboxadditions
if you use something older than ecomstation or 452 download an updated gengradd

I'm running it under Ubunut 9.04/64 with VB 308 and eCom RC7 - actually installation was fine, SNAP as video driver and JFS as file system. Soundblaster 16 and PCnet-FASTIII (NAT) - and the stuff is working, BUT the system freezes more or less often - espcially when I do lots of file accessing. As an example the installation of OpenOffice 3.1.1 always freezes the system during installation and also storing a large image file (>12 MB) also freezes the system pretty often.

I think this may be a JFS problem - at least under VBox. I can reliably and repeatedly crash OS/2 under Vbox by running a self-written application that writes lots of data to disk as fast as possible. If I run it on an HPFS{386} drive then it works perfectly in all situations, if I run it on JFS then the system freezes. If I run it on HPFS and then copy the files it writes to the JFS drive then it does not crash. I don't have any JFS drives on my non-VBox OS/2 running on native hardware so I can't check if it suvives there.

[marten]

I did observe the failure of the installation program (SEINST) also. It turned out that this not related to the VM settings but occured when HPFS was used as filesystem. It seems that HPFS and VBox don’t get along too well: I have seen more strange disk/file behaviour or even severe errors when using HPFS.
This problem appears to be totally absent when using JFS.
So: After choosing the first option from the very first CD menu (default settings) and using JFS as fs eCS installed within 15 minutes...

Hmm, the same erros happened to me, that trying to install ecs RC7 using HPFS under VB 3.0.8 under Ubuntu 9.04/AMD. But on the other hand using JFS has no problems during installation, but when putting stress on a running ecs/JFS my ecs more or less stops suddendly (frozen).

The installation using HPFS is aborted: seinst returns with error code 0x1604

[ingo2]

Hi guys,

me just came up something I found in the manual long time ago (when I went through it almost completely):

The problems with OS/2 and HPFS and now also JFS for sure have to be assigned to OS/2/eCS. There haven't been any updates on those file systems since years and even JFS for Linux is cared for by 1 IBM-person in his spare time.

But now to what I found in the manual: VBox can trim VHD timings and parameters - look in the paragraphs 11.1.2 and 11.1.3 of 3.0.8 manual on pages 144+145!

I have not yet had the time to play with those parameters to change flushing/committing to disks. But I can imagine that's what makes OS/ hang. I quote this section from the manual:

If desired, the virtual disk images (VDI) can be flushed when the guest issues the IDE
FLUSH CACHE command. Normally these requests are ignored for improved perfor-
mance. To enable flushing, issue the following command:
VBoxManage setextradata VMNAME
"VBoxInternal/Devices/piix3ide/0/LUN#[x]/Config/IgnoreFlush" 0

Best regards,
Ingo

[reiknir]

The problems with OS/2 and HPFS and now also JFS for sure have to be assigned to OS/2/eCS. There haven't been any updates on those file systems since years and even JFS for Linux is cared for by 1 IBM-person in his spare time.

HPFS is not being worked on, but JFS is being actively developed for ecs and an update was included in the silver release with more on the way, this is needed since the OS/2 fixes never made it to the Linux JFS codebase and the last IBM JFS/2 update was only distributed to large clients

Having said that I am running it error free under vista64 VB 3.10, so far anyway

[ingo2]

> since the OS/2 fixes never made it to the Linux JFS codebase

If I recall well it is just the other way round (check in the mailing list for JFS). IBM has released JFS under the GPL for Linux and active development continued. For legal reasons some improvements made by the Linux community could not be implemented in the OS/2 version which is proprietary code, without violating the GPL.

And some more history: JFS originates from IBM's AIX, a Unix flavour. It was ported from AIX to OS/2. Maintenence of the OS/2 version ceased when IBM ended support for OS/2. At that time JFS was released to the Linux community under the GPL and further developed by IBM and the community had the target to migrate existing OS/2 customers to Linux. There are still some incompatibilities between the OS/2 and Linux versions: i.e. the directory handling.

Try to copy a directory tree with many files under Linux on JFS and then mount/check it in OS/2 -> your lost+found will explode

(if my mind recalls well this has to to with directory enties passing a 1024 border? Linux doesn't care, OS/2 gets lost)

The compatibility at least ensures that:
Linux-Version does not alter OS/2's EA's and
OS/2 does not touch Linux permissions.

On my request Dave Kleinkamp (from IBM) added the possibility to mount OS/2-JFS partitions (without any permissions) under Linux using the options uid, gid and umask. The directory issue is pending since many years and will never be fixed (search the mailing list).

Ingo

[reiknir]

If I recall well it is just the other way round

No yo are misreading what I said, the Linux JFS is indeed a port of the OS/2 codebase, but all the OS/2 specific headers, hooks and more importantly the OS/2 specific fixes were removed from the initial release, so Serenity Systems needed to backport JFS onto eComStation

the initial JFS was on AIX, then OS/2 PPC (never released), then OS/2 x86 Server, then OS/2 client (as a paid for option only), then linux with all the AIX and OS/2 specifics thrown out, then eCS, their version is referred to as bootable JFS since the IBM OS/2 version was not bootable and only intended for data storage. The initial eCS version dates from 2005 and is in active development by the ecs.ru guys and is based on the Linux version NOT the OS/2 version.

the current AIX JFS codebase is different BTW.

[ingo2]

> The initial eCS version dates from 2005 and is in active development by the ecs.ru guys and is based on the Linux version NOT the OS/2 version

So, to conclude shortly eCS-JFS has a long porting history:
[AIX -> OS/2 (proprietary)] -> Linux (GPL) -> eCS (???)

If it really is based on the Linux-version it should be under the GPL with source code available - otherwise Serenity would be violating GPL!

(a situation which IBM was very scared about. They carefully kept 'Linux code' totally apart from their proprietary versions)

Ingo

[reiknir]

If it really is based on the Linux-version it should be under the GPL with source code available - otherwise Serenity would be violating GPL!

the source code is in the CVS AFAIK, under the OS/2 tree, although the boot miniJFS dll might not be since it may be written from scratch, have not had the time to take a closer look...... is everyone involved with "free" software paranoid?

Actually tried reading a eCS JFS partition from Suse just recently and could only get it to work if logged on as root, others have reported the same error in other distributions, but if logged on as root I could transfer data between OSs with no apparent problems. That begs the question of how do I mount extra disk images in VB?

[reiknir]

So, to conclude shortly eCS-JFS has a long porting history:
[AIX -> OS/2 (proprietary)] -> Linux (GPL) -> eCS (???)

More like
AIX PowerPC > OS/2 PowerPC > OS/2 x86 > Linux > eCS

with some of the changes from the OS/2 versions ending up in the current AIX codebase as well

[ingo2]

...... is everyone involved with "free" software paranoid?

I would say it different:
GPL software is a great thing and I support it and the idea. Closed source software is protected by law and the companies holding the rights spend money and manpower (attorneys) to defend/inforce their rights. GPL software belongs to the community and the community must take care to keep it free. Community means all users and contributers of such software - we don't have a big lobby.

Keep in mind:
GPL is a LICENSE which grants free use and modification - but only as long as all stays FREE!

Actually tried reading a eCS JFS partition from Suse just recently and could only get it to work if logged on as root

as I mentioned already above:
Linux JFS has 3 (probably undocumented) mount options (added by Dave Kleinkamp on my request):
uid=
gid=
umask=

These options were for sure available during the times of kernel 2.6.18 and I used them on SuSE ???
(and you may use them for FREE like JFS

This allows you to treat it almost like other file systems which do not support Unix permissions, i.e. FAT, and get access as a normal user.
You may try that on a command line, if it works put them in /etc/fstab.

Linux won't harm the OS/2 EA's and OS/2 won't harm the Linux permissions.