This is only for OS/2 Operating Systems


This program will turn on Linear Video and VGA video write combining, and CPU
to PCI bus write posting on Intel 82450 Orion chipset systems.

If you have an A2 level Orion chipset you should not use this utility, since
Intel claims that data corruption can occur if you use Write posting on an A2
chipset.

This utility has only been tested with matrox Millenium graphics cards.

The linear PCI video space is assumed to be at a fixed address, there are 3
versions of the device driver, load only the one for your cards video memory
amount (2,4 or 8MB).

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

The pgm was originally written for DOS by John Hinkley on Compuserve, ported
to OS/2 form by Roger Uzun (uzun@cts.com).
Copy the appropriate p6fsvdX.sys file into your OS/2 boot partitions \OS2
directory to start.

To use the pgm you need to load the appropriate device driver by adding the
following line in your config.sys

For 2MB Matrox Millenium cards
DEVICE=\OS2\p6fsvid2.sys

For 4MB Matrox Millenium cards
DEVICE=\OS2\p6fsvid4.sys

For 8MB cards
DEVICE=\OS2\p6fsvid8.sys

Once you have the appropriate .sys file in your \OS2 directory, and have
loaded it in your config.sys file and rebooted, you need to run the
fstorion.exe program in order to activate the orion features.
You can make an icon for it and put it in your startup folder, or run it from
a command line.

You need to run fstorion.exe from an OS/2 shell or an icon before the speedup
will be activated!

To test the speed-up you can open a FULL SCREEN DOS session and run the
program profile.exe provided.
If you run Profile 101 it will test the video memory in the VGA address space.
Running Profile 4101 tests the video speed in the PCI address space.
On my machine the results before running fstorion.exe are about 18MB/sec on
each.
The mode 101 goes up to 69MB/sec and the 4101 goes up to 89mb/sec once I have
loaded the driver and run the fstorion.exe program.

In all my tests it does not seem to speed up native OS/2 gfx operations, I am
not sure why. Well, it will speed them up a lot if you did not have write
posting enabled before, but the write combining does not speed things up over
the write posting.

-Roger