Back to Efika

Good Day Everyone!

After my last fights with the USB Mass Storage bounty I have decided to take a break there and continue with AROS port for Efika. The Mass Storage is basically ready, at least in my eyes, since I do lack the hardware where the whole USB stack makes any issues at all. It works here with two PC's I own and with two virtual machines: QEMU and VmWare Player.

Anyway, I'm back with Efika right now. I took my freshly written mass storage class, fixed the OHCI driver again (it uses the physical address provided by the CachePreDMA() call) and copied the whole Efika CD onto my SFS partition of USB stick. And guess what! I have the wanderer desktop on Efika in front of my eyes now! Horray! Screenshot will follow as soon as I organise a USB hub (two USB slots are not enough for mouse, keyboard and USB stick, you know :)

One note: as you may know from the lecture of my previous posts, both FAT and FFS filesystems lack proper caching and thus are relatively slow, especially on Efika. Attempting to boot from FFS partition on USB stick may take more than 10 minutes. Booting from FAT will not work, because this filesystem is still incomplete. As for SFS, Efika needed one minute to boot from it, approximately.

PS. Since the SFS filesystem for linux is not working well on my machine (it crashes the linux kernel during mount already), I have started VMWare with AROS and Efika cd's attached. Then I have plugged my usb stick, attached it to vmware and copied all the Efika ISO contents to the stick. Just as a proof that all the things are working here as expected.