New modified SMAP driver with FULL DMA support + HDL Dump svr 0.8.7

[yoshi314]

I decided to try again today, but through my router instead of patched. So I started uLE networking, then loaded 0.9.2a from my HDD Apps folder. Instead of showing the default hdld_svr screen with the "Ready." etc, it just went blank, but the ping was still there. So I tried hdl_dumb 0.9.0 and it worked. My speed is about 1.6-1.9mB/s.

what kind of router do you use?

i remember that i had worse performance with wrt54gl until i switched to dlink dir-655. and that was a few years ago. even though ps2 doesn't need high bandwidth, the router's performance is important. and the quality of network cables.


coming back to the topic of bugs :

i have an longstanding issue with pc-side hdl_dump client - if cpu load is relatively high, the transfer rate drops significantly. even if i/o is not saturated.

on vanilla 0.9.1 transfer would drop from 3.1 to even 1.2 mb/s if my cpu was somewhat busy. even light webbrowsing makes transfer rate drop a bit. concurrent network transfers do not impact the transfer rate, though.

i forgot to mention, this is on linux. maybe windows client has the same issue?

[ffgriever]

Rock stable 5.41MB/s through two 1Gbit switches and ~40m of cable in segments of ~10m (ps2<->switch) and 30m (switch<->router/switch), using laptop connected through 300Mbps wi-fi (tplink router with gbit switch). Direct connection with my laptop varies in range of 5.6-5.9MB/s. Quite amazing!

PS. Still the initialization issues. I have to run first PS2Net in uLE to make it work at all. It's not a big deal, though. I always launch it through uLE anyway.

Edit:
For some weird reason the hdd led just blinks once every ~20 seconds. All the time between blinks it's off. It was working fine with the original 0.91. Well, but it doesn't matter anyway. What counts is that it works fast and stable.

[yoshi314]

For some weird reason the hdd led just blinks once every ~20 seconds. All the time between blinks it's off. It was working fine with the original 0.91. Well, but it doesn't matter anyway. What counts is that it works fast and stable.

it was the same on 0.8.* although hdd led would blink more often. on 0.9.1 led was on all the time.

[altimit]

Now getting about 2.20mB/s average while installing ffgriever's FF12 IZJS (FF12 International: Zodiac Job System English Conversion). Same setup as last time, except PC is connected via 802.11n @ 72mbps instead of the 100mbit cat5. It may be my network adapter. Or even the crappy old 80gb hard drive. I don't know how old either are. Despite being a 50001/N I got it at GameStop, which doesn't include the adapter, so I ended up buying the adapter seperate.

[fresh]

Or even the crappy old 80gb hard drive.

Never. Only if it would be an old 80MB one...

[deba5er]

Actually hard drive makes a big difference in transfer speed. I changed nothing except the hard drive (same crossover setup from same laptop) and went from 3.31 mb/s to 4.60 mb/s average by switching out the 128GB IDE for a 1TB 2.5" SATA connected to a Marvell-chipset SATA adapter connected to the PS2 Network Adapter.

[reprep]

4.40 mb/s from laptop to PS2 direct connection on a 5000 series PS2. I am using a premade SATA ready network adapter. I was getting about 1.40 mb/s from OPL's hdl server. This speed increase is incredible. Thanks a lot. Hope to see it is used in more homebrew. I can't imagine such a speed in OPL with SMB. This would surely eliminate my need for my fat PS2's hard disk and i would use my slim PS2 all time.

[SP193]

Update: I was messing around with my modified ATAD driver that has full 48-bit LBA support (As opposed to the 32-bit LBA support that it's original version had), and managed to achieve sustained data transfer rates of about 5MB/s.

So what does this mean? Well, still no 48-bit LBA support for any homebrew software yet as the filesystem drivers have to be upgraded too.
That would also mean that all existing game installations have to be wiped and installed in a new (but similar) format.... something which I'm not too sure that everyone would be agreeable with.

As I mentioned in another thread, the current limit for the PS2's software is either 1 or 2TB (So anything larger will require new drivers).

I should probably mention that that driver supports 65535 sector block reads (Unlike it's predecessor's 256 block reads) and the server has 1024 sector buffers.

Now, the HDD seems to make less frequent reads and writes - and there seemed to also be a slight improvement in performance too... I noticed that the speeds occasionally crossed the 5.15MB/s mark.

On a side note, I should probably mention that I think that I've found a slight problem with the ATAD and DEV9 modules in the PS2SDK. If the dev9LEDCtl() function of DEV9 was used to control the LED instead, the LED doesn't light up at all! (!?)

It seems like the PIO_DIR register has to be set to 1 whenever the PIO_DATA register is written to (When switching on or off the LED).... but the Sony drivers never needed that! (So why? There's something wrong here...)

Anyone knows something about this?

@All: Yes, you are all right. The HDD does affect the speeds, since the read and write operations will be slowed down if either the NA or HDD is slow.

[deba5er]

In the other thread it was determined that existing homebrew works fine with 1TB drives, but not larger (1.5 TB and 2TB failed). As signed integers are used, only 31 bits are allocated to variables relating to size in bytes. I replied on the other thread that I have a 2TB drive and 3rd party SATA adapter and would be willing to test modified drivers for you.

[cosmito]

@SP193,

First of all, I congratulate you for this and also for your recent PS2ESDL. You're surely talented and looks you'll have a bright future.
Back to subject, your speedy SMAP might be very handy if used at the PS2 port of GDB, that would do wonders for decent debugging. If I'm not mistaken, GDB can also use UDP connections so it would be possible now(?), although my experience with it on the PS2 is currently with TCP.

For me, the slowliness of a GDB session on the PS2 is simple dreadful and I find debugging with printf very boring.