Raspberry Pi 3B+

It was indeed the disabled GNU in the source tarball that would not gawk. Loading a newer tarball worked OK. Many thanks.

I bought a new Pi 3B+, it arrived yesterday. Before that I prepared a 32 GB SD card on an old Pi and put some software on it. The software runned fine.

I mounted the card in the 3B+ and started. Some software failed to run:
Sargasso causes the machine to hang
OvationPro, the message is ‘OvationPro has suffered an internal error type=5’
DataPower2: ‘DataPower has suffered a fatal internal error (type=5) and must exit immediately’.

Is there a way of testing to find out what causes the problems so that I can put a to the point question here?

The versions of RISC OS and any failing software will always help diagnosis.

Sargasso uses the SWP instruction. It won’t work as is.

Type 5 is C’s way of saying bad memory access. Are you using ZeroPain? Are you using the latest versions of the software?

Sargasso causes the machine to hang

!PatchSWP removes the SWPs. Having done that Sargasso does run on my RPi3B+.

P.S. Sargasso 2.03 that is.

For programs maintained like ‘OvnPro’ – best to download the latest version.

The patched version of ‘Sargasso’ -looks as if it would work on Post RPC Hardware and VRPC-DL.

The RISCOS version is 5.24, no ZeroPain.
OvationPro is version 2.77, the latest version according to David Pilling’s website.
DataPower2’s version is 2.32 which is the latest as well.
Both are versions for the Iyonix, 32 bits.

The strange thing is that both runned on my previous Pi. I suppose there is an issue with some ARM instructions. So I sent the RunImages from OvnPro and DataPower to PatchSWP, the result is an Internal error: abort on data transfer…

Sargasso is fixed, thank you, David.

OvnPro 2.78b (22 May 2018)

@Colin Please, Colin, where did you find that one? The PlingStore has 2.77z and David Pilling’s website shows 2.77 as well.

https://www.davidpilling.com/ovationpro/upgrade/op278b.zip

Thank you, Colin.

Remarkable how difficult it can be to find some upgrades… The latest version of Sargasso was hard to find, at David’s site is a section upgrade but only shows 2.77. It’s no critisism, but it seems to be the art of maintaining the best kept secret :-)

Regarding DataPower, the only version supported on modern (ARMv7) hardware is DP3 3.16, or DP Home 1.70 (I think). I’m afraid your DP2 product was superseded by DP3 some years ago. Please note that even then, we don’t officially support Pi v3 (ARMv8) hardware, as we don’t have any Pi3 kit here (all the ARM-based computers we sell are ARMv7 architecture with A9 or A15 cpus).

I do know that older versions would have stability or crash issues on ARMv7+ as DP3.16 contained specific fixes for use on modern systems. I do recall one specific report of issues with DP3 on Pi3 when Pi3 first launched, but haven’t heard any further feedback. This could be because all DP users are running on ARMX6, Titanium or VA (or Pi1/2), or that it just works fine now.

Thank you, Andrew. I have some older machines DP still runs on. Will do for the two small databases I use.

Just a quick follow-up post to say that I’ve just been running a few ARMv8 tests today, and can confirm that DataPower 3.16 is working just fine (or seems to be in 5 mins use). This differs from the old report, so I am comfortable in saying that things have moved on positively in the last couple of years. Obviously I’ll be doing more ARMv8 testing with our stuff, but so-far, so-good :)

Does the version of DataPower in the current NutPi collection work on the RPi3/3B+?

Yes, AFAIK all our nutpi bits run on Pi3 as we worked with ROOL on updates etc for the last NutPi update (very shortly after Pi3 was released). ROOL were very helpful in testing things. The NutPi version is basically DataPower Home without the charts/graphs / analysis component, and with slightly reduced docs/examples, if memory serves.

hello all, i currently own 2 rpi3 B+ boards that are running headless linux, and i want to have one of them become my main desktop with RISC OS. ive read through this thread, and it seems that the NIC does not work? i was wondering then if i should just then have one of my pis act as a wifi bridge for this issue. id really like to use this OS and also learn how a program as well. ARM chips seem to interest me quite alot. especially for what they offer, and RISC OS along with that now.

Support for the NIC was added a week or two after the 3B+’s release – so any recent RISC OS version (5.24 or development builds) should work fine.

awesome. thank you jeffery. i could not find anything if it was fixed or not. any resources you can point me towards to learn how to code BBC BASIC? id also like to program C in RISC and some other languages as python, but i feel like learning BBC Basic might be good for someone like me who is new. again thank you :)

alright got RISC OS installed! this is QUITE a change from other OS’es i have used. this is gunna take some time learning….time for fun?

Some intro docs: https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/Introduction%20to%20RISC%20OS

thank you Rick. i see that the OS contains some documentation on scripting BASIC and Wimp. this is actually amazing the OS contains how to books, for free!

Does anyone know exactly what just the kernel of RISC OS Pi does? I’ve read that extension modules do most/all the “heavy lifting”, but I’d like to know exactly what just the kernel, itself, does. Is it considered a microkernel or a monolithic? How large is it, in Kilobytes? And what file(s) in the CVS repository concern just the kernel?

Does anyone know exactly what just the kernel of RISC OS Pi does?

A lot. The kernel interacts with the HAL to interact with hardware (interrupts etc) but it also presents much of the heart of RISC OS such as numerous OS services, SWI dispatch, module area, Dynamic Areas, memory paging and management… There’s a lot of stuff that probably shouldn’t be in there like keyboard and mouse handling (keyboard shared with the International module), reading the RTC, all the freaky stuff the OS_Byte calls offer, the VDU subsystem, blah blah.

I’ve read that extension modules do most/all the “heavy lifting”,

Depends upon what you mean. The kernel is fairly simple and not that unlike a souped up version of the BBC era “MOS”, and like the BBC era, extensions (modules in RISC OS, actual ROMs in the old machines) provide things like the filesystem and the graphical user interface. To be honest, RISC OS works as an interaction of everything supporting everything else.

Is it considered a microkernel or a monolithic?

Monolithic. All extension modules (those that are part of RISC OS and those written by people such as myself and loaded from media) run as extensions of the kernel, in the module area, with supervisor (kernel level) privilege.

How large is it, in Kilobytes?

Probably irrelevant, given that the 32 bit kernel needs a HAL and the HAL depends upon the hardware in question… [plus the ROM image leaves some slack space that in some versions used to be a place for storing NVRAM settings in the absence of having actual NVRAM).

And what file(s) in the CVS repository concern just the kernel?

Perhaps the directory called “kernel”?
https://www.riscosopen.org/viewer/view/apache/RiscOS/Sources/Kernel/

BTW, Jared, I’m not sure if you’re aware so I’ll say this – when I (or others) refer to the BBC family, we’re referring to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Master

Somewhere online (I don’t happen to remember where) is an Advanced User Guide for it (though the AUG for the earlier 32K BBC Micro is easier to come by). If you look at how events and paged ROMs work, etc, you will see many similarities between those early machines and RISC OS today (BASIC is code compatible and if you have suitable screen mode definitions it’ll happily run software from the early 80s; the OS_Byte mess owes a lot to the BBC days, and…and… ;-) ).

BTW, I didn’t see anybody answer this – you asked elsewhere if you should shut down the machine or just pull out the power connector.

The simple advice that applies to everything on earth is do not ever pull the power of anything that has a mounted active read/write filesystem in operation. A games console reading off DVD can be unplugged, a computer with harddisc (or SD card) should be shut down gracefully. It isn’t always possible (power cuts, brownouts…) but it isn’t wise to tempt fate.
Ctrl and Shift and F12 is how to shut down the machine. If you are using flash media, it is wise that you count to five before unplugging (to give the media time to clear any cached data not yet written to the flash).