Monthly Archives: March 2019

VC6 Ultimate updates

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I’ve been trading emails with various people from the project after I had made my post, and helping them integrate more of Visual Studio 2003 into the project and working through a few issues to bring far better compatibility to VS 2003.

And the best part is being able to build projects in parallel!

10.2 seconds in parallel!

I haven’t ordered new processors, so the 2.1Ghz parts are… lacking. However being able to use all available cores makes building DOSBox pretty fast.

Restricting the build to a single process takes 1:13 while the full parallel build on this machine takes a mere 10 seconds!

So absolutely check out VC6Ultimate!

Visual Studio .net Enterprise Architect

I uh, also saw this on archive.org, which may help people looking for this stuff from the future as old tools get harder and harder to find. Especially bigger editions like the Enterprise Architect version.

Linux hits version 5.0!

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YES OMG I can’t take it anymore.

So many emails/blogs/videos/messages/tweets/whatevers!

I get it, ok ok, Linus thought 4.21 seemed silly so went straight to 5.0. Contrary to the numbering it’s not a significant divergence.

There.

I said it.

Am I the only one being hit with 50,000 things about Linux 5.0?!

Degrading qemu performance in DooM

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Quick table… its late.

I’m using MS-DOS 5 & this benchmark suite loaded into a VMDK, and ran a few tests to check performance numbers.

version2 3d bench3 chris bencha doom ticksc quake demo
0.9.0182257.426346.4
0.10.5204247.649141.7
0.12.5305.1296.747546.8
0.13.0305.3284.351145.7
0.14.1289.6285.350945.2
0.15.0213.4176.952015.3
1197.9152.154615.5
2.4.0.1392.1340.674324.2
3.1.50405462.3149733.3

I snagged 3.1.50 from https://qemu.weilnetz.de/w64/

better performance than v2, sure, but for interactive stuff.. not so much.

So what is really going on here? Why is 0.90 so much faster when it comes to doom, and how is it possible that it’s the slowest in raw CPU performance. And fastest at IO? It appears that the crux of the issue is simply how it handles its IO, heavily favoring device performance VS CPU.

I’ll have to follow up with more builds and reading release notes to see what changed between releases. And what was it exactly that broke between gcc 3 and 4, and why the rip had to be.

I still like 0.90, if anything for it’s ability to run NeXTSTEP and NetWare.

So I was building a Windows 2019 server

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As I got a ‘totally legit’ serial code in my box of cereal.

After the install I thought it’d be fun to install the Linux Subsystem.

While following the powershell instructions here, I thought the list of quick links of distros to download was interesting:

That’s right ARM Linux userland! I still have high hopes for Windows on ARM (I have 2 Windows RT devices now!!) although I’m not holding my breath.

Maybe there will be some ARM boards that are suitable for the desktop that aren’t over 1k USD.. That’d be nice.

Interesting trivia is that the Linux Subsystem started it’s life on ARM as a way to run Android binaries on Windows Phone. And true to everything Microsoft does, it got to the point where it could start to run things (albeit poorly) and was summarily killed. Although it’s found life despite the original false start as a general ‘text mode’ subsystem for Windows.

However running Linux binaries on Windows currently just shows that NTOS isn’t as efficient as the Linux kernel when it comes to emulating the Linux ABI. Although this was the original ‘dream’ of the microkernel, and a POSIX subsystem for NT was always part of the original design, although it really was more of a checkbox for GSA contracts, and outside of being able to use pax & vi it really was handicapped by not having BSD extensions, and especially by not having any access to the TCP/IP stack.

EDIT*

I should add these notes from the future past for the future me, when messing around with Windows Server 2019 build 1809 when they finally brought the Linux Subsystem into the fold. Unpacking the distribution and running the ‘setup’ sets it up DIRECTLY into that directory. So put it where you want it.

When you mess that up, you have to use the wslconfig program!

Of note is:

wslconfig /list /all
Lists all distributions, including ones that aren’t currently usable. They may be in the process of installing, uninstalling, or are in a broken state.

wslconfig /unregister <DistributionName>
Unregisters the distribution from WSL so it can be reinstalled or cleaned up.

This way you can now clean up your mess, and get Linux installed right.