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      /  Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
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paolone 
Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 18-Apr-2016 13:06:18
#1 ]
Super Member
Joined: 24-Sep-2007
Posts: 1143
From: Unknown

Have you ever wondered how fast would be an Amiga-like system, if only it could run straight from the RAM drive? The following video I shot for icarosdesktop.org will give you a idea.

http://vmwaros.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/running-icaros-at-light-ehm-ram-speed.html

In this 3-minutes long video you can really *feel* how fast our systems CAN be. To run that, I moved one of my Icaros testing virtual machines to a Windows RAM drive (yes, you can enable RAM drives on Windows if you want), and ran it from there under VMware Player. Please notice that this solution adds 1) overhead for hardware emulation, 2) overhead for FRAPS recording video on a physical hard drive. Even under these conditions, however, applications just started and loaded files *IN* *NO* *TIME*.

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Massi 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 18-Apr-2016 13:24:47
#2 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 2-Feb-2011
Posts: 627
From: Rome, Italy

@paolone

The discovery of hot water

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bennymee 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 18-Apr-2016 13:35:40
#3 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 19-Aug-2003
Posts: 696
From: Netherlands

@paolone

The quality of the video in only 360P could be a little better IMHO.

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paolone 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 18-Apr-2016 13:37:13
#4 ]
Super Member
Joined: 24-Sep-2007
Posts: 1143
From: Unknown

@Massi

Yeah, but I was thinking about practical solutions for this hot water. A presistent RAM drive (which might store datas on a SSD or a hard drive at shutdown or, even better, when idling) would allow mounting, on a 64 bit OS, a whole system drive of various GBs of size on RAM, including all needed files and applications. Making the most responsive OS solution ever.

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paolone 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 18-Apr-2016 13:40:11
#5 ]
Super Member
Joined: 24-Sep-2007
Posts: 1143
From: Unknown

@bennymee

Video was shot at 1600x800, half size, in order to introduce as less overhead as possible, and keep the original speed as much as possible. If only I had a SSD drive at disposal, I would have saved it @full HD 1920x1080.

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nikosidis 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 18-Apr-2016 22:34:27
#6 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 9-Dec-2008
Posts: 994
From: Norway, Oslo

@paolone

Whow that was sick fast ☺

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Raffaele 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 18-Apr-2016 22:53:52
#7 ]
Super Member
Joined: 7-Dec-2005
Posts: 1906
From: Naples, Italy

OK..
Amd now go create a valid RAD: device for AROS!

_________________
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pixie 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 18-Apr-2016 23:01:55
#8 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 10-Mar-2003
Posts: 3115
From: Figueira da Foz - Portugal

@paolone

I would assume that programs are loaded to ram, so despite the initial time being a little slower I would think that Cinnamon, OWB or even the Bar should be as fast.

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TheAMIgaOne 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 19-Apr-2016 8:19:06
#9 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 10-Jan-2004
Posts: 776
From: United Kingdom

@paolone

Been there done that, I did this a couple of years ago on my AmigaOne when looking into a userlogin type system.

Bootloader would load a diskimage(small copy of Workbench) into ram and then assign all the new paths to the mounted image

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fishy_fis 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 19-Apr-2016 12:22:42
#10 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 29-Mar-2004
Posts: 2156
From: Australia

@TheAMIgaOne

The difference being though that what Paolone has done is an entire fully fledged system, including apps and games in RAM.
Not possible to the same extent with OS4 and an amigaone as youre restricted to 2gig in total, and that includes the ram used to run the system and any software the system is running.
Quite limited there. Heck 2gig is barely enough ram to even run a modern browser unless you make compromises, and thats without having the entire sys:, work:, games:, etc. partitions in ram. PPC also requires more ram than x86 in a like for like scenario.

Last edited by fishy_fis on 19-Apr-2016 at 12:26 PM.

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olegil 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 19-Apr-2016 13:42:29
#11 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 22-Aug-2003
Posts: 5895
From: Work

@fishy_fis

Couldn't you technically do this on AmigaOne, though? Would require drivers to use memory about 2GB as ramdrive, but can't see why this would be in any way difficult.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

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TheAMIgaOne 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 19-Apr-2016 13:46:38
#12 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 10-Jan-2004
Posts: 776
From: United Kingdom

@fishy_fis

I think we're missing a major point, as you say 2gb is a limitation, so your telling me you'd rather a system that loads over 2gb+ of data before you even boot up....

You can have multiple Rad: drives on OS4, so how is this different to It on AROS

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themamboman 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 19-Apr-2016 13:53:27
#13 ]
Member
Joined: 29-Mar-2013
Posts: 62
From: Unknown

RAM drives have always been awesome. The fact that AmigaOS has one built-in by default shows how far ahead of the others it STILL is in some ways.

I use ImDisk on Windows a lot. It made some RAM-based file manipulation tools so much faster and more flexible as I could use disk file-based tools on some files that I couldn't do if they were just loaded into memory arrays.

I tried to see if running AmigaOS4.1 Classic under WinUAE if using BlizzardPPC (not CyberStormPPC so I could get double the available Amiga RAM) would help the slower performance. It was better but still, CStormPPC WinUAE was still faster.

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pavlor 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 19-Apr-2016 19:02:41
#14 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 10-Jul-2005
Posts: 9578
From: Unknown

@olegil

There is some EMO RAM support for RAM disk in 4.1FE, can´t say, how robust/useful.

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pavlor 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 19-Apr-2016 19:04:14
#15 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 10-Jul-2005
Posts: 9578
From: Unknown

@themamboman

Quote:
. It was better but still, CStormPPC WinUAE was still faster.


603e emulation is broken in QEMU... 1/10 of 604e performance on the same hardware.

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fishy_fis 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 19-Apr-2016 23:43:11
#16 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 29-Mar-2004
Posts: 2156
From: Australia

@TheAMIgaOne

Not suggesting it cant be done, just saying its very restrictive with a 2GB limit for everything,... hdd image, and ram to run the os and apps in.
No such limits apply with what paolone has done other than the ram limits of a 64bit os.
Yes, you have to spend a minute or 2, once, to copy the hdd image to the Windows ram drive, but you can then set a seperate chunk of ram aside for aros to use for the system and software running.
Ram speed of a modern system is also much, much, much faster than that of an amigaone, ergo........

Again, not suggesting it cant be done, just that its a chalk and cheese comparison.

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Crumb 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 20-Apr-2016 7:55:37
#17 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 12-Mar-2003
Posts: 2209
From: Zaragoza (Aragonian State)

@paolone

I saw that on real miggy using a rad disk... twenty years ago. But thanks for your video, it will surprise peecee users who don't have a clue about miggies

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olegil 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 20-Apr-2016 10:08:20
#18 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 22-Aug-2003
Posts: 5895
From: Work

@fishy_fis

I don't understand why the HDD image would have to be inside the 2GB limit, when the reason for the 2GB limit is in software.

And indeed Amiga OS 4.1 support "Exec Extended Memory Objects", which fixes this just fine. I don't see any reason why this would be difficult at all.

Anyone have the sources to ramdrive.device?

And indeed, from http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Exec_Extended_Memory :
Quote:
Another example is RAM disk. The V54 RAM disk makes use of the ExtMem object interface allowing out-of-the-box usage of those normally unassigned memory blocks without draining the valuable main memory. Since (depending on programmer setting) memory blocks can even be allocated on-demand instead of ahead of time. This will make RAM disk have an even lower footprint on top of making it possible to store larger amounts of data than ever before.


So where's the problem?

Last edited by olegil on 20-Apr-2016 at 10:11 AM.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

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itix 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 20-Apr-2016 10:11:31
#19 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 22-Dec-2004
Posts: 3398
From: Freedom world

@paolone

I get the point but it makes no sense to cache background images to RAM drive if you are using them only once. In practise you get better result with fast hard drive and good filesystem caching system.

Booting is fast but it is unfortunately quite moot point because you restart Amiga maybe once in a day.

But it is fast. There is also advantage that it wont get corrupted if some Amiga program goes nuts. You can have RAD on real Amiga but it may get corrupt at anytime due to lack of memory protection.

(Removed some non-sense, didnt realize it was using Windows RAM drive.)

Last edited by itix on 20-Apr-2016 at 10:16 AM.
Last edited by itix on 20-Apr-2016 at 10:15 AM.

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Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

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itix 
Re: Blazingly fast: running the whole system from a RAM drive
Posted on 20-Apr-2016 10:26:06
#20 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 22-Dec-2004
Posts: 3398
From: Freedom world

@olegil

RAD does not necessarily survive from reboot on modern computers.

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Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

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