At 03:23 PM 4/3/2005 -0300, Geraldo Netto wrote:
michael does a nice job with emm386/himem and martin stromberg did a nice job too a long time ago... now, what about both working on emm386/himem?
We no longer need a confab of main-line developers for HIMEM and EMM386. There is a misperception of status here. The base development of HIMEM is complete. The base development of EMM386 to MS-DOS 5.x capabilities is complete. Sometime in the next 3-6 days after I finishing debugging the EMS/XMS pool sharing feature, the base development of EMM386 to MS-DOS 7.x capabilities will be complete. There are no major missing features for either HIMEM and EMM386 after that. EMM386 in some respects is already more powerful than Microsoft's last version, such as found with the X=TEST and auto-VMware detect features, although a few minor features and obscure API functions are still missing.
Are there small or "nice" enhancements and feature additions that can be made? Certainly. You could probably add features and tweak operations for the next two or three years. Eric Auer already has a list of favorites, although he hasn't convinced me of the need for them, as yet. But someday, someone may very well add them to EMM386 or HIMEM -- it could even be me should I feel particularly frisky. Whatever enhancements may come afterwards, however, they will not be critical or even terribly important to the majority of users. Main-line development is done.
The fact is that HIMEM and EMM386 coding, following XMS/EMS pool-sharing release, will mostly likely switch to almost exclusively maintenance mode. I'll hang around to fix bugs that surface, answer queries, and perhaps even add a bell or two, but the main work should be over no matter what happens with the two memory managers from here on.
And, frankly, I anticipate that I too will shift the bulk of my open-source development time allotment to other projects soon. I came in with three goals of 1) making HIMEM/EMM386 more generally usable by, and stable for, the average FreeDOS user; 2) adding EMM386 VCPI support; and 3) adding the EMS/XMS pool sharing feature. That's almost done and it's time to reposition. OpenWatcom appears to have a few remaining holes that I am reasonably qualified to plug. Or, there is a serious need for someone to write a cross-platform generic source translation utility. Or, perhaps a bit of retaliatory coding by placing LRU-2Q algorithm support in LBACACHE to improve its performance. Or not.
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