5 ms·

My A1000 took a minute or so to boot. It spent about 10 seconds with the Kickstart diskette, then swap to whatever program I was running for another ~50 seconds

My A1000 took a minute or so to boot. It spent about 10 seconds with the Kickstart diskette, then swap to whatever program I was running for another ~50 seconds or so. Until one day I read in a magazine how I could create a ramdisk ("RAM:") and use my startup-sequence file to load Workbench in there. Then the warm reboots were instantaneous magic! (But a cold start took a bit longer as it had to copy the entire contents of the WB disk into memory. Worth it.)

snvzz 7y ago
>Until one day I read in a magazine how I could create a ramdisk ("RAM:") and use my startup-sequence file to load Workbench in there. RAM: is a fs like Linux's ramfs, and is implicitly mounted on early boot, you don't need to create it. It is also gone on reboot. What you're referring to is ramdrive.device, typically mounted as "RAD:", which is implemented as a standard reboot-persistent module that offers a standard trackdisk block device, and can be configured as bootable. You'd format the drive with FastFileSystem or OFS after creating it.
- function_seven 7y ago
  In Workbench 1.3, the device was named "RAM:" (EDIT: I'm wrong). Not sure if that changed in later versions of the OS, but 1.3 was as far as I got with the 1000. And yeah, I guess I didn't "create" it so much as "use it as the boot disk". It was gone on power-cycle, but it persisted through so-called warm reboots. (CTRL+𝔸+𝗔, I think?)
  - snvzz 7y ago
    Definitely "RAD:", not "RAM:". RAM is a filesystem and not reboot persistent. RAD is a block device and reboot persistent. Article on RAD usage: http://www.amigareport.com/ar139/p1-6.html http://www.amigareport.com/ar139/p1-6.html Annotated disassembly: http://wandel.ca/homepage/execdis/ramdrive_disassembly.txt http://wandel.ca/homepage/execdis/ramdrive_disassembly.txt It's fresh to me, because I still use my Amiga computers.
    - function_seven 7y ago
      Thanks. Your first link dislodged some cobwebs. I'm definitely confused after all these years. Yeah, it must have been the RAD: device that I copied my WB1.3 disk to.
      - snvzz 7y ago
        As an added note, ramdrive.device would use chip ram, which is not very clever as CHIP RAM is limited and precious, besides slow from a CPU perspective. There's third party RAD implementations that use FAST RAM instead.

snvzz 7y ago

>Until one day I read in a magazine how I could create a ramdisk ("RAM:") and use my startup-sequence file to load Workbench in there. RAM: is a fs like Linux's ramfs, and is implicitly mounted on early boot, you don't need to create it. It is also gone on reboot. What you're referring to is ramdrive.device, typically mounted as "RAD:", which is implemented as a standard reboot-persistent module that offers a standard trackdisk block device, and can be configured as bootable. You'd format the drive with FastFileSystem or OFS after creating it.

function_seven 7y ago
In Workbench 1.3, the device was named "RAM:" (EDIT: I'm wrong). Not sure if that changed in later versions of the OS, but 1.3 was as far as I got with the 1000. And yeah, I guess I didn't "create" it so much as "use it as the boot disk". It was gone on power-cycle, but it persisted through so-called warm reboots. (CTRL+𝔸+𝗔, I think?)
- snvzz 7y ago
  Definitely "RAD:", not "RAM:". RAM is a filesystem and not reboot persistent. RAD is a block device and reboot persistent. Article on RAD usage: http://www.amigareport.com/ar139/p1-6.html http://www.amigareport.com/ar139/p1-6.html Annotated disassembly: http://wandel.ca/homepage/execdis/ramdrive_disassembly.txt http://wandel.ca/homepage/execdis/ramdrive_disassembly.txt It's fresh to me, because I still use my Amiga computers.
  - function_seven 7y ago
    Thanks. Your first link dislodged some cobwebs. I'm definitely confused after all these years. Yeah, it must have been the RAD: device that I copied my WB1.3 disk to.
    - snvzz 7y ago
      As an added note, ramdrive.device would use chip ram, which is not very clever as CHIP RAM is limited and precious, besides slow from a CPU perspective. There's third party RAD implementations that use FAST RAM instead.