SheepShaver with pcap support

It "works", just incredibly slowly

It “works”, just incredibly slowly

so I got it to “work” on OS X….. well 10.6 in VMWare. I have no idea if this means it will work on your setup.

  • If AppleTalk packets get passed early in the boot stage, it will crash.
  • If JIT is enabled, it will crash
  • Performance is horrible, I’m getting 150k/sec on my LAN, Basilisk II with no JIT blows this thing away.
Honestly I feel kind of hesitant releasing this, but I know it was desired, and I guess it’ll help someone somewhere being able to have an easier conversation… So I’m going to upload my source tree, including binaries built with GCC 4.0 & 4.2 with either O2 or Os flags. I’m not sure which is more stable/faster…So here is my source tree. Sorry you still have to deal with the changing password thing, but cancel it, and it’ll tell you the password.Other lessons learned… SheepShaver’s segfault model only works when the CPU thread is the main thread. Even though you “can” stuff the CPU into a subordinate thread, it doesn’t play nice once it segfaults, it’ll just spin waiting for something that clearly isn’t going to happen.In config.h I added in USEGLOBALvideo as a way for main to call the screen update to end the vast majority of pool leakage. I also added SHEEPSHAVER_CURSOR to enable the hardware cursor. I was having some issues installing OS 8.x when the ‘hand’ was drumming the fingers waiting for the OS to install it crashed many times, while disabling the hardware cursor made it play nicer. Maybe it’s my setup, I’m not sure.

Also in this version I don’t read .sheepshaver_prefs but rather sheepshaver_prefs in the current working directory. I didn’t want to trash any other prefs. I have to test again but I think this should work on 10.10 … As I found out the hard way x86_64 binaries can no longer mess with the zero page, so this is a 32bit only build, but I was running it with my SLiRP fixes ok on my macbook air.

This hasn’t been extensively tested. I hate to even call it tested, I just copied a few MB of stuff over an NT server running AppleTalk,a nd viewed some flash video with Internet Explorer 5.1 …. I’m sure there are PLENTY of things broken. JIT should work with these binaries (Quake 1 is quite playable), but DOOM crashes hard (isn’t it a 68k binary?). DOOM runs ok on Basilisk II so does it matter?

If you want speed, JIT + SLiRP is the way to go. Since this is basically the same as the version I was using with BasiliskII I think it’s more stable than the generic version as I could at least run all kinds of programs with some of my fixes vs the ‘stock’ github version.

I should add that I’ve been primarily testing with that PowerMac 9500 v1 ROM, along with MacOS 8.6. I found 8.0 and 8.1 too unstable, 7.x & 9.0.4 uninteresting.

To get around the early crashing while booting 8.6, I rigged it to drop the first 30 packets. I’ve successfully booted 10/10 times, so I’m almost OK with that. I’d rather know when the OS is ok, and go with that, but I’m not sure. I thought about a timer, and say ignore the network for the first 30 seconds, and maybe that is the better way to go. When you launch this you’ll see some message updating about packets and “wait for 30->” and a number… once it reads “wait for 30->30” , the message will no longer update, and it’ll start to forward packets into the machine. You probably will have to disable and re-enable AppleTalk from the chooser to see the network (or I had to). You may have to get creative to generate the needed packets on your network to get it over 30, as those are packets received. Broadcast packets work too, so maybe you can work with that… As long as Sheep Shaver isn’t alone something should be looking for other devices.

Time for another Cockatrice release

I’ve been busy at work, but I did get some stuff done on this over the weekend, and just wanted to push this version out while there is some momentum.

The big fixes are in SCSI to support the dynamic scatter gather buffers so you can format big (lol) disks.  Then again I only tested a 2GB disk but it’s working fine as far as I can tell.

I also hard coded SCSI id #6 as a CD-ROM.  It only reads HFS partitioned images, and only can boot from a handful of those.  From some SCSI CD emulation packages with passthru it performs just as poorly, so it’s not just me.  I tested with the ‘blessed’ Win32 build 142, with ForceASPI in a Windows XP VM with emulated SCSI CD.  There is a lot more ‘magic’ going on with the cdenable.sys driver on the Windows side, which mounts ISO’s without any hesitation.

This also includes my latest networking fixes as I moved more of the networking code to use queues, forced the 60Hz timer to hit the network card so it won’t stall anymore, and added in that timer patch, that more than doubled my LAN download speeds.

I’ve also added a simple PCAP filter as I noticed that my LAN was quite chatty, and I figured all this traffic wouldn’t be good as an emulator really shouldn’t be processing stuff it doesn’t need to.  Something like this:

(((ether dst 09:00:07:ff:ff:ff) or (ether dst ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff) or (ether dst fe:fd:00:00:16:48)))

09:00:07:ff:ff:ff is the AppleTalk broadcast address, ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff is the typical all hosts broadcast, and I’m still generating a MAC based on PID which is good enough for me.

Speed!

Feel the need for speed!

So while before downloading 124MB on my LAN took 8 minutes, now it’s about a minute.

I’ve updated the sourceforge page with source, Win32, Linux i386 and OS X (10.8) builds. I’ll add a 10.6 x86/PowerPC build later.  On the sourceforge page I also added a utilities section with a simple ISO image with various utilities to get you started, including the A/UX partitioning tool to partition & format a virtual disk, a tool to try to mount ISO’s (remember HFS has the only hope right now), QuickTime, Flash, Internet Explorer and some other stuff.

Also, thanks to Peter, it’s also available on github, so my horrific edits are open for the world to see…

I have no idea why the networking in Basilisk II keeps stalling

And it is quite frustrating.  The most I can do is about 100MB worth of AppleTalk traffic, or 1.5GB of TCP/IP then the receive function EtherReadPacket just stop being called, and then the whole thing stalls out.

I don’t really ‘like’ my solution, but it does work.  I went ahead and chained the EtherInterrupt function to the 60Hz timer to ensure it’ll fire, and it seems to be working. The good thing is now I’m getting ~200K/sec using pcap or SLiRP.  So things are faster!

Then after scanning the changelog, I found this interrupt patch, and it doubled my throughput on the network to over 400K/sec!

427K/sec via SLiRP

427K/sec via SLiRP

So now I can copy about 350MB worth of data in about 5-7 minutes, and it doesn’t stall out.

357MB worth of AppleTalk

357MB worth of AppleTalk

I can now copy hundreds of MB worth of stuff from one AT server to another.

What is also surprising is that by using Internet Explorer 4.0.1 for MacOS, I get speeds of around 1.0Mb/sec(with as high as 1.6!)

Internet Explorer 4.0.1 screaming along

Internet Explorer 4.0.1 screaming along

I know IE has always had a bum rap, but it really is a better legacy browser on MacOS.

I also merged the scsi driver’s buffer with BasiliskII’s buffer so the scatter/gather can now handle the absurd requests of 4MB++ worth of reads in one swoop.

Announcing Cockatrice III

Well I was shuffling files back and forth into Shoebill, and with the advent of Ethernet support, I decided I wanted to build an AppleTalk network.  This endeavor seems to have taken a life of it’s own.

So, the first thing I did was tear into minivmac, as I figured it would be the easiest to modify, as ‘mini’ is in it’s name.  But it’s more geared to LocalTalk.  From it’s readme:

It does this by converting the LocalTalk packets between SDLC frames in the virtual machine to LocalTalk Over Ethernet (LTOE) packets.  These LTOE packets will be sent out the host machines Ethernet interface and will reach any other machine on the LAN.  LTOE packets are not routable and not recognized by EtherTalk devices.

Which is pretty creative, but I want to talk to A/UX, Windows NT and Cisco routers.  So this isn’t going to work out for me.

The next other ‘big’ names in Macintosh emulation are Basilisk II and SheepShaver.  Both of which are from Christian Bauer which is a sizable download (or so I thought) and has a very confusing release versions for Windows. So I went ahead and tried BasiliskII, which only does some native networking via a TUN/TAP & bridge solution (which is really popular solution for plenty of UNIX based stuff), which personally I don’t really care for.  The Windows version does support SLiRP, but for some strange and annoying reason it always crashes when I try to download anything big.  As a matter of fact, the Windows version crashes, a lot!

While digging around for various builds of Basilisk II, I found the defunct sourceforge page, which is thankfully still up.  And there I found the 0.8 and 0.9 release source code, which weighs in at a tiny 350kb in size.  This is something I could probably dive into.  So I went ahead and tried to build it on a Debian 7 x86 VM.  And much to my surprise, after altering configure to accept GCC 4.7, and forcing it to turn X11 on (I don’t know why it kept failing to detect it), I was able to build a binary in no time.  Even better, it worked!

So the first few goals were simple, I wanted to take 0.8 and remove it’s dependency on X11,and make it use SDL 1.2.  Why not SDL 2.0?  Well 2.0 is more about 3d space, and even to render a flat framebuffer it uses streaming textures.  Which is too heavy for me, so I’m sticking with 1.2.  I took a bunch of code from SDLQuake, and after a while of bashing it around, I was able to open a window, and capture some ouput from the framebuffer.  With even more bashing around I got it to work correctly.  I did make some small tweaks though, it only supports 8bit depth.  But I’m interested in networking, so 256 colours is fine by me.  Now that i could see what I was doing, I was able to then re-compile on OS X, and I was greeted with the Mac Boot screen.  The harder part was Windows, as the system code written by Lauri Pesonen who did an excellent job of porting BasiliskII to Windows, but to say their code took 100% advantage of the Win32 API would be an understatement.. And I wanted something more pure to being SDL so I really couldn’t use much of that code.  And what code I could find it was for far later versions.  However with enough pushing I did finally get BasiliskII to boot up on Windows.  I was once more again bitten by the fact that open on Windows defaults to being in ASCII mode.

The next thing to add was SDL input for the keyboard and mouse.  And at this point googling around for an example of an input loop for SDL that is appropriate for an emulator I stumbled uppon the fact that there already was a SDL support built into the more current version of Basilisk II.  But for some strange reason I kept going ahead, and incorporated some of the code into my 0.8 branch.  And then I could finally send some keystrokes, move the mouse, and click on things!  Things were looking up!

While looking at the SDL code, I did see they also have audio support, so I went ahead and borrowed the skeleton framework from there, although the initialization didn’t work at all as BasiliskII had drifted in how it hooked into the native sound support.  So I once more again turned to SDLQuake, and I was able to initialize sound, and Even get QuickTime to play the old Quadra quicktime video, which was the first QuickTime thing I’d ever seen, back when they were still making Quadras.

So now with video and sound in place, it was finally time to tackle the networking.  At first this seemed quite easy to do, and using SIMH for inspiration I was able to quickly replace the tun/tap code with some pcap code to open the interface, send packets, and receive packets.  One more again I started on Linux, made it build on OS X, although my MacBook air doesn’t have anything I can really inject packets into so I don’t know if it actually works.  The bigger test for me was on Windows with a GNS3 network, and with a few more minor changes I was happily sending AppleTalk to both Shoebill and Windows NT.

The next thing I wanted to tackle was SLiRP support.  Ironically to bring SLiRP to Shoebill I used the SLiRP from the github of Basilisk II.  At this point I figured this would be very simple, and I could wrap up later that day.  It ended up taking me three days.  Once more again my build would crash all the time, just like the later Basilisk II builds.  Using Internet Explorer 4.0.1 would seemingly crash the whole system within seconds with faults in SLiRP’s slirp_select_fill, and slirp_select_poll functions.  Now if you don’t call these functions SLiRP doesn’t process it’s TCP state and you end up with barely functioning UDP to only SLiRP which isn’t great beyond DHCP and DNS.  First I tried semaphores which only made things worse as the nature of Basilisk II’s threaded nature just made the requests stack up deadlocking within seconds.  I tried a mutex, timed mutexes and various other locking methods insdide of SLiRP and Basilisk II to no end.  Netscape would kind of work, but IE would crash the whole thing out after a few pages. Then a better solution hit me as I was playing with the system clock on the Windows build.  There is a 60Hz timer that calls a 1Hz timer once every 60 ticks.  What if I had the clock drive SLiRP?  And to my amazement not only did that work, but it worked great until I hit another problem that I had with Shoebill (that needs to be fixed now that I found away around it here).  There is a static buffer that passes data between SLiRP’s callback when it is going to send a packet to BasiliskII and when Basilisk II then feeds the packet to MacOS.  With enough traffic it will overwrite part of itself as they are on two different threads.  Once more again I tried semaphores, which of course is the wrong tool here as if something is stacking waiting for it to unstack is just crazy, and more mutexes.  The mutexes kind of worked but performance was horrible, as in 1992 dialup speed horrible.  And I didn’t want to simulate a 1992 internet experience 100%

So the obvious solution as a queue.  I took a simple queue implementation, added the ability to peek, changed it to accept a packet structure and I was set.  Now I only needed a mutex when I queued items, and dequeued them.  But I could hold 100 packets easily.

So with all that in place I can finally download files greater than 10MB, and even with Internet Explorer!

Download

124MB in 8 minutes!

So the next was to make Pcap dynamically loaded, which for C++ is a bit of fun with __cdecl, GetProcAddress and all that fun.  But I had it working after a bit so now if the user doesn’t have WinPcap installed they don’t get an error message, and I don’t have to maintain two builds.  Nobody likes doing that kind of stuff.  Ever.

Multitasking.. Kind of.

Multitasking.. Kind of.

There is still plenty of things broken afterall I’m using an ancient version of Basilisk to base this off of. I’ve also removed a bunch of features as I wanted to make this more of a ‘core’ product with again a focus on networking.

Will this interest the majority of people? Probably not.  But for anyone who wants to actually download a file this may be somewhat useful.

Where to go from here?

Well there is still a lot of OS specific stuff in the code that I want to convert to SDL.  I’d like to build from a 100% more generic code tree rather than having private files here and there.  The CPU optimization programs that re-read GCC’s assembly output don’t do anything.  I want to try it through an older version of GCC and see if there is any difference in speed.  I also recently received the source code to vc5opti.cpp and I’d like to try that to see if it speeds up the Windows Visual C++ based build.  Long term I’d love to patch in the UAE CPU code from the newer versions that have a far more solid 68030/68881 and 68040 emulation.  The price of standing on so many tall shoulders is that when I fall off I don’t know if the CPU exceptions I see are faults in the CPU emulation, Basilisk II or just plain crashes in MacOS which was certainly not the most stablest thing once you mixed in multimedia and networking.  It was par with Windows 3.1, which honestly both of them were ‘saved’ with help from the older generation, ala BSD Unix for MacOS, and the VMS team for Windows.

So after all this I’m ready to release some binaries, and code.  Although the last thing I wanted to do is add more confusion by calling this Basillisk II v0.8.SOMETHING … A quick google search on Basilisk gave me this:

As for some reason I actually never did look up what a Basilisk was.  So seeing that this project is basically the same thing I chose Cockatrice.

The Cockatrice III source forge page is here, Windows binaries, Mac OS X binaries, and source code here.

There are plenty of bugs, and plenty of things not working, but it works well enough to do things, and that is a credit to everyone who worked on Basilisk II before me.

pcap and IPX/SPX

I found this link where someone had implemented a virtual NE2000 for DosBOX, allowing you to run among other things DOOM!

This reminded me of my own work to add pcap into Qemu back in the 0.9.0 days… SO I figured I’d try to build the thing out and see how they interact!

So the first thing to do was build DosBOX, and add the patch. I found that 0.73 worked pretty well for this!

So after some hammering around, I got it to build, and launched it on two separate machines (one over terminal server) on my lan, and launched the oldest network doom version I could find to get things going.

Doom multiplayer IPX-SPX

Doom multiplayer IPX-SPX

And there we go. Now in the dosbox.conf you have to make sure that they have unique MAC addresses, and of course, that they are bound to the correct physical nic. in the config file, there is a list option that will print out the possible choices then you can just put the number, or the full name into the right spot on the ini file. I’ve build a prebuilt win32 version of this with all the DLL’s and the gravis ultrasound enabled… You can download it here.

The next thing I did was search high & lo for my patches to Qemu, and thankfully I’d emailed them to myself as it seems all the other places are dead… So with a little playing with Qemu 0.90 to enable the adlib, and remove some logging messages, I’d built a client machine again with Doom. Naturally I had the DosBOX & Qemu face each-other off.. Sadly this is a little SLOW.

DOSBox and qemu IPXSPX Doom

DOSBox and qemu IPXSPX Doom

For those that wish to download, you can find the Qemu client & server files.

Now for Qemu, you’ll need to get that full NIC name… Dosbox provides a great way to see what it is, just paste it into the batch files, and you’ll be good to go.

And remember you’ll need WinPcap installed!!!!!!

Some fun networking with MS-DOS & Novell Netware.

Ok I wanted to do this eventually but now I’ve finally done it. I have constructed something a little complex but it works surprisingly well.

Let me draw a picture so it’ll be a little easier to follow:

proxmox Netware diagram

proxmox Netware diagram

 

All of the machines in clouds are virtual…

Ok I’m going to assume you can install & configure OpenVPN on your own. I did a really simple install on Proxmox VE, just be sure to use the e1000 network adapters. All the others gave me tones of errors with any sizable traffic. Also I should point out that I’m using OpenBSD 4.3 which is the latest as of today.

dev tun0
dev-type tap
ca /etc/openvpn/ca.crt
cert /etc/openvpn/server.crt
dh /etc/openvpn/dh1024.pem
key /etc/openvpn/server.key
server-bridge 192.168.6.33 255.255.255.224 192.168.6.50 192.168.6.62
push “route 192.168.6.0 255.255.255.0”
push “dhcp-option DNS 192.168.6.34”
client-to-client
duplicate-cn
keepalive 10 120
max-clients 100
persist-key
persist-tun
status /var/log/openvpn-status.log
verb 3
tun-mtu 1500
fragment 1300
mssfix
float

Again I just followed the example from the OpenVPN site to set this up. What makes this different though is the fact that I’m using this in a bridge mode. As you can see I have told OpenVPN that it is to use the tun0 interface as a ‘tap’ driver.

My hostname.tun0 is this:
Link0 up

Likewise the bridgename.bridge0 is:
add em1
add tun0
up

And finally for this example my bridgename.em1 is:
inet 192.168.6.33 255.255.255.224 NONE

So using this setup I have a ‘private’ 192.168.6.32/27 network in which I’ve got a few virtual machines running and space for my laptop to VPN into. Now one of the virtual servers on my Proxmox server is Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server… Yeah I know I got it cheap on ebay, and I kind of like it. Anyways I’m running Qemu on it, which is running Netware 3.12. I installed the libpcap then I had to find out what my Ethernet devices are called. I used wireshark (it was ethereal) and it’s a cool program to have around. The last version to run under Windows NT 4.0 was 0.99.4 so that’s the one I used. Once I have done this I found my device and was able to setup a string for Qemu (which was \Device\NPF_RTL80291)

Here is what I’m using:

Qemu –had netware.disk –m 16 –M isapc –L pc-bios –net nic –net pcap,devicename=”\Device\NPF_RTL80291”

This sets up an ISA computer with 16 megaybtes of ram and a single ISA nic that will utilize libpcap to send out frames on the rtl80291 that’s being emulated to my NT terminal server by proxmox.

On the ‘client’ side of things, I’m running the 64 bit version of Vista. So I’ve installed the OpenVPN that not only has 64 bit device drivers, but has a nice little GUI to connect & disconnect from the networks. Here is the OpenVPN config that is on my laptop.

dev tap
ca ca.crt
cert client1.crt
key client1.key
client
proto udp
remote 192.168.1.75 1194
resolv-retry infinite
nobind
persist-key
persist-tun
;comp-lzo
mssfix
tun-mtu 1500
fragment 1300

Ok, so far so good. Now I do have Virtual PC 2007 on my laptop, and I have made sure that the “Virtual Machine Network Services” were bound to the “TAP-Win32 Adapter V9” interface.

The it’s a simple matter of connecting to the VPN, then loading up the virtual PC with MS-DOS & the Novell Netware client.

Then you should be able to ‘bind’ to the server & login!

dos netware client

dos netware client

The ‘cool’ thing about this setup is that it will work over things like wifi, and easily allow you to add clients near & far. Oh and the best part for the wifi crowd is that it will use REAL encryption since WEP/WPA have all been shown to be useless. Oh yes, and it should allow you to host your DOOM, Quake 1, Rise of the Triad, Warcraft II, and Descent games…. Along with people playing at home! Using this you too can build your own IPX/Internet network!

I do hope this clears some of the uses & versility of Virtual servers, Qemu & Virtual Networking.

Netware 3.12 with Qemu

Ok I’m getting more requests on this which means I’ll finally do it.. I didn’t mean to put it off THIS long, honestly!

I have issues with Qemu 0.91 under Vista so this will all be with Qemu 0.90.

I have built a version with the libpcap compiled in, and placed a copy of the winpcap that I’m using in with this zip.

You can download the libpcap enable Qemu for Win32 right HERE.

I’m using the enclosed 1.cmd to run the thing, and I’ll go over more of it tomorrow.