MiSTerArch

[amstan]

Hello everyone, I've been brewing this for a little bit and it seems to work great. So I tought I would share with a larger audience.

I present MisterArch!!!

misterarch_logo.png (171.06 KiB) Viewed 7160 times

It consists of a few packages (thinking about more in the future perhaps) to allow one to install Arch Linux ARM on their MiSTer and still keep most (maybe all) of the gaming functionality.

screenshot_ssh.png (64.48 KiB) Viewed 9537 times

So far I have:

• Mister's kernel package (capable of being compiled as an Arch package), with a few CONFIG_ tweaks to improve the QOL of a normal linux distro (+btrfs and moved exfs to a module due to a bug).
• Mister's uboot, compiles just fine. But it's identical to what the original Mister OS normally ships, custom boot.txt is the only difference there
• mister-bin, aka Main_MiSTer + systemd job for it to start at boot
• mister-menu

These are all available in a proper arch repo, just `sudo pacman -Syu` to update all (both arch and the mister i repackaged)

Check out the installation instructions, if you've ever installed a linux distro from the cmdline this shouldn't be too difficult. Prebuilt [sd card available](https://github.com/MiSTerArch/binaries/releases/latest) if you're not comfortable with partitioning the sd card yourself.

The rest is up to you! Literally! The proper DIY Arch way.

So far I've just resorted to `git clone https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Distribution_MiSTer.git` inside /media/fat. But I hear some people saying they had good luck with theypsilon's new https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Downloader_MiSTer stuff (though you might want to make sure it won't try updating any linux stuff, at least with `update_linux = false`).

[amstan]

Some notes about the philosophy of this project:

Why do I want full linux? Shouldn't I just get a raspberry pi?
Honestly, I don't like appliances. I expect every computing device (especially when it does weird stuff like mister) to be flexible enough for me to do equally weird things with it. Things like incrementally backing up my btrfs snapshots (you know, where I store my warcraft 2 saves) to another computer, running dosbox experiments whenever I feel like it without compiling anything, usb/ip if i'm too hobo to get an otg adaptor right away.

Let's replace the world order!
Please slow down. I've been pretty shy in sharing this project. It's just a bunch of packages to make arch work. I don't really want to make a whole distro, and I don't want to support anyone (especially if they don't know Linux). If you can get it to work, by yourself, I'm glad! If you can provide reasonable patches that are well planned, I'm happy to accept them. I don't want to make a big deal out of this, or to open a non profit for it. I'm sharing more now because it seems it's running away from me.

What's this french mister version?
It seems that a few early interested people took upon themselves to already fork my project (but not keeping any git history of course). I can't stop them, but I can point out a few mistakes that they have already made in regards to my previous point (especially after just mass copying my very early draft plans). They also have a binary sd card image, but I can't vouch for anything in there.

[atrac17]

So far I've just resorted to `git clone https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Distribution_MiSTer.git` inside /media/fat. But I hear some people saying they had good luck with theypsilon's new https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Downloader_MiSTer stuff (though you might want to make sure it won't try updating any linux stuff, at least with `update_linux = false`).

There's nothing wrong with what theypsilon has done. To be frank, he's done great work. Given the circumstances and limitations, he's essentially built a package manager that doesn't exist in the current state of an official image.

What's this french mister version?
It seems that a few early interested people took upon themselves to already fork my project (but not keeping any git history of course). I can't stop them, but I can point out a few mistakes that they have already made in regards to my previous point (especially after just mass copying my very early draft plans). They also have a binary sd card image, but I can't vouch for anything in there.

You mean the information from a reddit thread? Then after reaching out on voice and I quote "Do whatever you want, it's open source". The draft I asked you to make for a repo you didn't know existed? That you shared paste bins of?

Thanks for your three odd weeks of MiSTer usage. Get your SDRAM module yet? Yes, what you did was a great contribution but don't act like you walk on water and talk shit about people who have been doing things for years.

[Solskogen]

Cool project. Gonna try that now!

[amstan]

There's nothing wrong with what theypsilon has done. To be frank, he's done great work. Given the circumstances and limitations, he's essentially built a package manager that doesn't exist in the current state of an official image.

Yes, the Downloader_MiSTer looked cool and might work as is unleashed on /media/fat without having to make more arch packages. I wish there was a way to tell it to not touch any linux stuff (including /etc/, dialog, menu.rbf and even the MiSTer main binary). It's the previous updater.sh I had some concerns with and was not sure it would ever work in something like Arch.

[Thedad]

Hi,

Appreciate what you've done here and the work that's gone into it, but I'm gonna wait until this matures a little before I consider it.

My main reason for using MiSTer is to learn about FPGA coding and the cores. The Linux side is not really what motivates me, so as long as it works, I'm good, because I can currently get much more support for it, if anything happens.

Apart from that, I completely encourage open development, like this. So keep it going!

[softtest9]

Interesting. What are the benefits for end-users, or is this mainly for developers? Is this a drop-in replacement for MiSTer's own distro? What are boot times like? Does BTRFS work with all cores out-of-the-box?

[Solskogen]

The benefits are that you'll get a full linux distribution, and a great package manager. It's a replacement, but it's for advanced users.
Boot times are a bit longer, but still only a couple of seconds boot time. I'm using it now with BTRFS, which is quite cool. I was hoping that I could use sparse images, but that has some issues at least with the AO486 core (Formatting fails)

[gamesfan]

Can anyone tell me how I could launch a game using terminal command? I know we have MGL now, if I could figure that out, I think we can install Emulation Station as a frontend on Archlinux bringing us a UI like Retropie (and many other SBC) use while being able to call on the native cores and launch roms, rather than Retroarch which would be garbage on this CPU anyway.

[hostile]

beautiful
"Pre-built SD images of MOnSieurFPGA for the DE10-Nano using MiSTerFPGA userspace binaries and ArchLinux on the armv7h cpu."
https://github.com/MOnSieurFPGA/MOnSieu ... ADME.md#L3

https://github.com/MOnSieurFPGA/MOnSieu ... age_Builds

[aberu]

Amstan seems to be respectfully just sharing a personal project, and the MOnSieur team seems to have an agenda born out of personal grievances and saw an opportunity to use Amstan's personal project as a way to advance this agenda. Doesn't seem like a good foundation for a healthy project.

I think I'll wait till the MOnSieur team has a proven track record before I test it out to see what it can do, because for now it seems like something that will become abandonware shortly. That being said...

MOnSieurFPGA images give the end-user freedom to choose what THEY decide to do with the Linux ARM side of THEIR DE10-Nano.

I can already play video games on it, so I'm good.

Will MOnSieurFPGA enhance your end-user experience? YES.

How? My end-user experience just involves playing games.

The ability to update and add Linux drivers! Wi-Fi sucks? Not anymore! Free yourself from wired restrictions after initial setup.

There's a huge number of compatible wifi adapters that far exceeds the list in the wiki. When you find one that doesn't work, merely sending the vid:pid to sorg almost always results in a quick update, or the community showing you how to install the driver yourself.

Don't want to wait 30 seconds for your SNES 8GB compressed zip file to open? Rejoice! It's instantaneous! Were you wasting SD/Storage space and uncompressing your files? NOT ANYMORE!

Seems kinda weird to keep 8GB of SNES games on the MicroSD in a zip file, but maybe that's just me. I'm a little priveleged in that I use a NAS I suppose. But also MicroSD storage is cheap, 256GB name-brand good quality MicroSD are $30 USD. Not that big a deal.

Extend your vintage computer cores by using your favorite open-source tools on MOnSieurFPGA and the SHARED FOLDERS!

https://birdybro.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTe ... /computer/ - like we already can?

Develop for the MiSTerFPGA platform? Then MOnSieurFPGA images are for you. Anything that isn't taxing on the arm7h cpu is now at YOUR discretion. Having the ability to add userspace development tools and/or utilities for MiSTerFPGA without using additional devices is great.

Why would anyone want to develop on what is essentially an underpowered and underclocked Raspberry Pi 3 processor? Maybe not even that, maybe a Pi 2 processor even... People that develop homebrew would be limiting themselves significantly by using the DE10-Nano's hardware as a development environment.

Maybe you want to make an MegaDrive game? Well, now you can use SGDK by Stephane and compile the rom on the device you're going to test it on! There's a romantic side about using the device every one's going to be playing on for your vintage software development!

It's kinda weird to link to SGDK specifically instead of all the other tools (or more easily just say homebrew development tools and not link to anything), is there some specific reason why the MOnSieur team preferred to link to SGDK instead of all the others out there? I don't know if developers would find waiting a longer amount of time arbitrarily for their homebrew to compile to be very "romantic".

Anyways...

Changing the linux kernel to an unsupported one that is a fork of Amstan's by people who are apparently not capable of creating and maintaining a distro (unlike Amstan who is), who are also immediately antagonistic toward the person they forked it form, seems like not such a good idea. There isn't any maturity seen from the behavior of the MOnSieur team and it makes me doubt the sincerity and maturity of their advertised alternative.

[amstan]

Despite the motivations, having the ability to do more things with the OS is cool and useful sometimes.

I'm guessing by "SHARED FOLDERS" they mean the various fuse filesystems available. I personally need to have sshfs for example (to get to my "NAS" ), I have not used samba in years.

Despite the lack of cpu power it's sometimes useful to be able to stage things directly on the device (like git adding, and git committig), it's just a little bit less awkward than scping every little tiny change. If someone wants to install more tools (python3.10, even a compiler), they're free to do so and will probably work (if you're willing to wait), sometimes that helps to increase convenience. I guess here I'm lightly on the "why not? do whatever" side, since you get all of these for free (installing dosbox is hilariously easy, dependent on nobody in this thread).

Not really sure what wifi improvements they're talking about. Unless you want to recompile the kernel with quite different configs, installing Arch doesn't automatically get you that. You get fancier network managers, sure, but that only gets so far (unless you're really into VPNs or exotic enterprise wifi setups like eduroam). linux-firmware is also included I guess, but I assume the original Mister OS comes with it.

[amstan]

(like even a compiler)

Hilarious example, let's compile Main_MiSTer on a MiSTer (thanks Solskogen for the tip):

338.40s real 633.35s user 25.51s system 194% cpu 106kB mem $ make BASE= -j2

5 min for a full build is not that bad, incremental builds where you only change one file at a time could be seconds. For reference: A linux kernel usually takes about 5 min even on a beefy x86 machine.

The other point is that I did this only with a MiSTer, without having to worry about a cross compiler. My only other computer in this house could have been a phone (I'm sure that could be handy to a lot of Windows folk here if they want to dabble in a little bit of linux without dual booting).

[amstan]

Interesting. What are the benefits for end-users, or is this mainly for developers? Is this a drop-in replacement for MiSTer's own distro? What are boot times like? Does BTRFS work with all cores out-of-the-box?

Audience? Anyone that really likes using linux.

Drop-in? Yes

boot times? A couple more seconds extra. Let's check systemd's log, graphical.target is also when Main_MiSTer starts.

Code: Select all

% sudo systemd-analyze      
Startup finished in 3.776s (kernel) + 9.239s (userspace) = 13.015s 
graphical.target reached after 8.848s in userspace

I usually can't tell given that I have to walk back to my couch and wait for the hdmi inputs to switch.

BTRFS + cores? Not sure what you mean by this. If we're talking about ARM CPU cores, sure, as long you don't mind it sharing the cpu with MiSTer binary that's at 100% CPU all the time (though you could turn it off temporarly to do other cpu intensive things).

FPGA cores? They all access HD storage by asking nicely Main_MiSTer, which in turn it just a linux program asking the kernel for storage, this last part is supposed to be standard and filesystem agnostic. If we're worried about case sensitivity, that might be a problem, but there's fuse tools to help us with that.

[aberu]

Despite the motivations, having the ability to do more things with the OS is cool and useful sometimes.

Sure, it's just going to be a very limited subset of users with very rare situations that would want this, personally. The MiSTer isn't really about using it as a linux PC. At least you recognize that it's an appliance by design and recognize that most people probably wouldn't need or want the alternative you came up with.

I'm guessing by "SHARED FOLDERS" they mean the various fuse filesystems available. I personally need to have sshfs for example (to get to my "NAS" ), I have not used samba in years.

Yeah, I can see why you haven't used Samba for years (being in IT professionally myself), Samba sucks, it's bloated, inconsistent, and frustrating overall when there is any kind of protocol incompatibility. But MiSTer prioritizes Samba as the protocol on purpose because the average user uses it as an appliance and most people just don't have a linux NAS lying around and simultaneously go out of their way to avoid Samba (because Unraid/FreeNAS/etc... make setting up Samba super easy). Most people have Windows. At first I thought you would mean that you use NFS instead, but why do you need/prefer sshfs? SCP and SFTP already works and sshfs is essentially just SFTP at the end of the day, isn't it? I'm a little ignorant about the advantages of sshfs over just using scp/sftp instead, admittedly, so I'm interested.

Despite the lack of cpu power it's sometimes useful to be able to stage things directly on the device (like git adding, and git committig), it's just a little bit less awkward than scping every little tiny change. If someone wants to install more tools (python3.10, even a compiler), they're free to do so and will probably work (if you're willing to wait), sometimes that helps to increase convenience.

Running a compiler on the MiSTer would be a bigger waste of time than SCPing back and forth. Additionally, homebrew devs use debugging tools in software emulators all the time. MiSTer cores don't have breakpoints, don't have indepth debug output, don't have the ability to dump the RAM to logs en masse, and don't usually have savestates and pause/rewind/fastforward/slowdown which are all essential tools to homebrew developers when they use emulators. The marketing bullet points do not seem to be well researched or have any real understanding of the use-cases for homebrew developers.

I guess here I'm lightly on the "why not? do whatever" side, since you get all of these for free (installing dosbox is hilariously easy, dependent on nobody in this thread).

Yeah the "why not, do whatever" side is one thing. For personal projects and for fun, absolutely. The "ours is better and here's why" kinda vibe from their team is another, and can easily be debated. I'm mostly responding to the latter. Like, why would anyone really want to install dosbox? It's useless on the MiSTer pretty much entirely.

Not really sure what wifi improvements they're talking about.

Yeah the wifi improvements thing was confusing to me too, I think it's mostly that adding support for your wifi adapter sometimes requires asking for support by raising an issue on github, or by installing it manually (which can often be done on MiSTer sans Arch anyways).

[amstan]

At first I thought you would mean that you use NFS instead, but why do you need/prefer sshfs? SCP and SFTP already works and sshfs is essentially just SFTP at the end of the day, isn't it? I'm a little ignorant about the advantages of sshfs over just using scp/sftp instead, admittedly, so I'm interested.

sshfs uses the same protocol tools like sftp and scp use, but it's not a manual process. I can mount a folder from another computer and have MiSTer access it the just like it's a local file (with some speed differences). If you used "cifs" on mister so far, it's a similar workflow there.

[held]

I guess here I'm lightly on the "why not? do whatever" side, since you get all of these for free (installing dosbox is hilariously easy, dependent on nobody in this thread).

...Like, why would anyone really want to install dosbox? It's useless on the MiSTer pretty much entirely.

Well that person would be me. I have serious issues with the AO486 core, its nice to have a real computer sometimes, but that AO486 overhead is something else

I prefer DOSBox over the AO486 any day. Hopefully that will change in the future. But if someone gets DOSBox working on the DE-10 along side MiSTer, I will be using it

So the question is, how useless is it?

[amstan]

I prefer DOSBox over the AO486 any day. Hopefully that will change in the future. But if someone gets DOSBox working on the DE-10 along side MiSTer. I will be using it

So the question is, how useless is it?

Eh..... like 3fps in warcraft 2?

Go try it, maybe I'm doing something wrong.

I wouldn't jump the gun and say dosbox on the ARM core should replace AO486. But it might be handy in rare situations, idk.

What I like is that it's trivial to install such things from the upstream arch repo and check.

[held]

I prefer DOSBox over the AO486 any day. Hopefully that will change in the future. But if someone gets DOSBox working on the DE-10 along side MiSTer. I will be using it

So the question is, how useless is it?

Eh..... like 3fps in warcraft 2?

Go try it, maybe I'm doing something wrong.

I wouldn't jump the gun and say dosbox on the ARM core should replace AO486. But it might be handy in rare situations, idk.

OMG I had no idea, that is rough Luckily not my only reason for using DOSBox. Did you by any chance compile it with /heavydebug and did you try the debugger?

[atrac17]

Birdybro/aberu: Why do you continuously create conflict? Mutual friends said you wanted to get along?

Eat a thirty pack of hotdogs. You are the reason I won't touch a thing except rescuing Toaplan. STOP MAKING ME MONSTER, OK?

[djhardrich]

Amstan and Birdybro/aberu: No, by “Shared Folders,” we mean the Shared Folders on the HPS that interface with computer cores such as Amiga/ao486, because it’s useful having your own personal suite of tools to manipulate/augment/process files (think images/audio) before they’re loaded in a program running inside of an FPGA core (or post-processing a file after saving it to the Shared folder). Respectfully Birdybro/aberu, if your only end-user use case is to “just play games,” then that’s fine, but dictating that people can only use computer cores to play Monkey Island is ridiculous, and it’s unproductive to throw shade at someone’s work just because *you* don’t find it useful. To put a further point on it, I’ve created two threads on this forum for MiSTer users that make music, one adds audio sampling support to the Amiga core via recording on the Linux HPS and seamlessly converting/saving to the Amiga Shared Folder, but it requires a crossbuild of sox which gets less trivial to build for each MiSTer Linux release, and -should just be a package, as it’s a standard Linux userspace utility-. The other was a writeup on building a UserIO MIDI cable/adapter, with my builds of MickGyver’s UserIO MIDI implementation, and I was told that it was useless for playing games, will never be included in Main, and goes against the spirit of the project (just playing games). Now it’s called mt32pi support, and is one of the most popular features of the platform. Aberu, just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it should be the target of hatred/disrespect….

[Solskogen]

Ok, I've now tried MiSTerArch with both btrfs and ext4 to check out how they compare performance wise.
ext4 is the clear winner. Both performance wise and utility. Sparse files does not crash on ext4, while on btrfs formatting fails when using AO486.
BTRFS has it's uses, but I would rather recommend going for ext4 on SD cards.

[amstan]

Ok, I've now tried MiSTerArch with both btrfs and ext4 to check out how they compare performance wise.
ext4 is the clear winner. Both performance wise and utility. Sparse files does not crash on ext4,

That's cool! I like where such tests are going. Maybe include exfat as well (you can just add it to /etc/fstab) and provide numbers, I would be interested.

I was going to say I guess i don't care about the perfomance difference if it means I can still do my btrfs backups.

while on btrfs formatting fails when using AO486.
BTRFS has it's uses, but I would rather recommend going for ext4 on SD cards.

Oh no! That sounds bad. Fails in what way?
Is my dos vhd in danger? I've been running it in btrfs for a while now.

[amstan]

OMG I had no idea, that is rough Luckily not my only reason for using DOSBox. Did you by any chance compile it with /heavydebug and did you try the debugger?

I did not compile it myself. All I did was type `sudo pacman -S dosbox`. Anything more is an exercise for the reader. If you can figure out some ways to improve performance I'd be happy to help coordinate build flag updates to the upstream arch package.

[Solskogen]

I created a 4GB vhd sparse file on BTRFS and formatting during Windows 95 setup failed. Sometimes it failed during installation instead (and the whole core froze) - It *might* have to do with me using zstd for compression.

I don't have the numbers, as I rather take a "feel" on how long the formatting and installation goes. ext4 was about 3 to 4 times faster.

[aberu]

Birdybro/aberu: Why do you continuously create conflict? Mutual friends said you wanted to get along?

Eat a thirty pack of hotdogs. You are the reason I won't touch a thing except rescuing Toaplan. STOP MAKING ME MONSTER, OK?

You are not recognizing that you are the source of conflict here in this thread with amstan, you are not recognizing I was expressing skepticism of the claims made on the repo you are involved in, you are misconstruing what I told my friend (that I'm cool with anyone, but you seem to really hate me and I don't know why, you blocked me randomly on Twitter and have engaged in aggressive trolling of me multiple times in many areas), you are using something that appears to be a homophobic insult toward me (maybe I'm misreading you telling me to eat a pack of phallic things), you are lying as to the reason why you don't like to contribute to the project anymore, and you are directly trolling and disrespecting Sorgelig sarcastically by making fun of the fact that English isn't his first language.

I hesitated to even engage with this annoying bait so you and your buddies can make fun of me some more, but I really don't like being lied about. You are very childish, impulsive, impatient, and willing to burn bridges or be aggressive over the slightest bit of criticism or disagreement. That being said, I have said before, and will continue to say, I recognize and appreciate your positive contributions to the scene at large. We all don't have to get along in order to help people enjoy retro gaming. I don't expect every person to be the same personality who contributes in this space. I am happy you did the redump revivals, I still refer people to them regularly, your work on MRA's is important, and I'm glad you help refine the experience of using Jotego's cores. I don't hate you, I just don't hold back my opinions of your actions when you do things like this.

but dictating that people can only use computer cores to play Monkey Island is ridiculous, and it’s unproductive to throw shade at someone’s work just because *you* don’t find it useful.

I'm not dictating anything. Do whatever you want, it's open source.

Aberu, just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it should be the target of hatred/disrespect….

I don't hate it, and I'm not disrespecting it. I'm fine with the work Amstan did and have had questions answered multiple times both here and on discord. I'm skeptical as to some of the claims made. I think that there is probably some value in packages, but scripts do more than an adequate enough job for something like the MiSTer. I think that the linux customizations being lost is something that should probably be fixed if they are features that users typically take advantage of. Those two things I can see advantages in. However, I have my opinions on the value of it to MiSTer users and I'm allowed to express those opinions openly. I also have made my opinions clear on the behavior shown here. That's about it.

[held]

Eh..... like 3fps in warcraft 2?
Go try it, maybe I'm doing something wrong.

Well I got to source a new sdcard first. However this is my setup for Warcraft, but I don't know how much that would increase that 3FPS

Code: Select all

cycles=30000
dos32a.exe war2.exe

And dos32a is here

[djhardrich]

Birdybro/aberu: “ Amstan seems to be respectfully just sharing a personal project, and the MOnSieur team seems to have an agenda born out of personal grievances and saw an opportunity to use Amstan's personal project as a way to advance this agenda. Doesn't seem like a good foundation for a healthy project.

I think I'll wait till the MOnSieur team has a proven track record before I test it out to see what it can do, because for now it seems like something that will become abandonware shortly. That being said...”

This isn’t shade/disrepect? You go on to talk as if you’re an expert about both Amstan’s work and mine/atrac’s and haven’t actually tried any of it (and don’t actually understand why someone would want to use it).

“ but scripts do more than an adequate enough job for something like the MiSTer.” I’m not sure you get this, but you’re literally dictating what people should do with their devices with statements like this.

I’m not here to be gaslit/argue semantics with someone that’s had a track record of twisting my very specific words in some very public places, and it’s clear that you don’t want to acknowledge things you’ve written in this thread, your theorizing on performance/utility is all extremely unproductive.

Since you felt the need to point out that you don’t find my work or contributions to the community valuable, feel free to disconnect your mt32pi and play Sierra Games without music from here on out too!

[amstan]

Alright, let's calm down. Seems like we all agree a little bit on some things (that we could experiment all we want).

I'm mainly interested in the technical aspects in this thread. For example why windows 95 images do not play well with btrfs (did not think i would use those terms in the same sentence, that's hilarious), or how to make dosbox go more vrrrrmmm!

[wark91]

btrfs is still evolving a lot so maybe in some years it will be largely used and compete with ext4 or fat32 ....
since one months a lot of things happen on core AO486 to support Linux + WindowsNT 4.0
New commits also will come for better support on IDE, etc... maybe it will worth to test again your issue on Windows 95.

Regarding this project, I don't understand why people wants to play dosbox or something else on ARM side. It is better to use a real RPI4 or his computer. the ARM is like a RPI1 without GPU so ....

Other point, we need to be aware of Linux and command lines to have benefits of this project. It will be a choice for persons who have habilities to put their hands on it at this stage of the project.

Hope you can figure about those issues you listed !