On 9/14/2011 7:31 AM, Travis Siegel wrote: > Mike, I like your suggestions. One thing that always bothered me > about dos versions that have come out since ms dropped the ball is > their complete lack of inovation. I realize there's only so much > that can be done if you're intending to keep 100 percent > compatibility, but still, it's not hard to imagine such details as > enumerated here. > One thing I wonder is why nobody builds a dos multitasker that simply > spawns a new virtual 386 machine for each new dos task. That would > keep 100 percent compatibility, and still allow complete and free > multitasking. The virtual 386 machines would take care of > virtualizing keyboards and video output automatically, since it's all > built into the 386 hardware. I'm fairly certain, none of that > ability has been removed with the newer cores and such. > I see no reason why this sort of thing couldn't work. I'm not > positive, but I think this is the approach vmix386 took, and why it > worked so well (at least with my testing) it would be fantastic to > have such an os.
What I suggested earlier can be implemented using the virtual 386 mode. The difference is that instead of running several virtual 386s independently, the DOS kernel within the virtual 386 can coordinate/share resources with other DOS kernels running concurrently. This gives the illusion of true multitasking in DOS while keeping separate hardware resources so that the ill-behaved programs we love so much can still touch all of the hardware and memory in their address space. The other, more modern alternative is to use KVM/QEMU and the hardware support built into the more recent x86 processors. This setup is used by other virtualization environments, and KVM/QEMU have the advantage that the guest OS (our DOS kernel) can do "magic" syscalls to ask for an assist from the host OS (Linux). It allows us to move a lot of the DOS kernel into KVM/QEMU where you have a much better programming environment (Linux), resources, etc. > Another thing I wonder, is why it is that nobody has built anything > that allows executing of multiple oses on a single computer, using > one cpu core for each os, thereby allowing each os to run natively on > it's own cpu, thus eliminating the need to vertualize anything > (except perhaps output and input), but then each and every os would > have it's own cpu, and all of them would run at full native speeds. > Then you could have as many oses running as you have cpu cores to > handle them. > (still waiting) I guess someone will do it eventually, but until they > do, I'll stick with my osx machine, and my several dos boxes > scattered everywhere. :) > I'm sure somebody does that, but that is more of hard partitioning scheme than a virtualization scheme. PowerPC machines can do that (LPAR) as do large IBM mainframes. Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ BlackBerry® DevCon Americas, Oct. 18-20, San Francisco, CA Learn about the latest advances in developing for the BlackBerry® mobile platform with sessions, labs & more. See new tools and technologies. Register for BlackBerry® DevCon today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/rim-devcon-copy1 _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
