Eric, > On May 3, 2021, at 2:37 PM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > > > Hi Ralf, > >>>> RC4 is no slower than RC3 or RC2. > >>> Which is too slow, given that easy solutions >>> have been available for several years, which >>> could speed up the process by a factor four. > >> Does it really matter? It is not that it takes hours, >> nor is the average user doing this rather frequently... > > It was part of what started a whole 1.3rc3 thread on BTTR: > > "Everything takes a lot of time (installation and the Live boot)." > > And the solution would be trivial - load a cache :-) > > UHDD makes this painless because it can share cache > RAM with UDVD2 loaded after it, so you do not even > have think how much cache you want for CD/DVD and > how much you want for harddisk and other drives. > > Actually one of the first things I have ever written > for FreeDOS was a cache, because that was one of the > things I would have really missed when dumping MS DOS > and switching to FreeDOS back at that time. > > When I was trying to impress the world with FreeDOS 1.0 > when it came out, one of the more embarrassing moments > was not being sure whether the installer had crashed or > just was horribly slow while scanning for USB or network > drivers or something along those lines. > > People are spoiled today by how fast their systems can > boot, but also by how fast installers are. A friend has > installed Linux from scratch multiple times on a mint, > empty computer because it was so easy and fast and he > wanted to compare a few install and partitioning styles. > > So given that we now HAVE the technology to do a smooth > and swift install on hardware, it should be USED. Just > saying "Oh, but when I simulated the boot CD as some ISO > file on my M.2 SSD in VMware, it was fast!" would imply > that we are not so interested in users with real DOS PC.
Install reliability and stability are of prime importance. After that comes luxuries, like improved performance. Every improvement takes time. Sure some take a long time and some take only a couple minutes. Now stack each of those nibbles of time on top of each other. Now you got some serious work ahead. It’s not like we are over staffed with people sitting on their hands looking for things to do because they are bored. > I even have a separate read-ahead tool which could speed > up the boot process of the floppy edition: You would not > have longed for THAT so much with MS DOS, but FreeDOS 1.3 > features a graphical floppy splash screen and you can see > the bytes coming in one by one without caches there ;-) Yeah. I told you that it was an issue on the Floppy Edition on real hardware and It was going to be fixed. Not like you discovered some hidden earth shattering new there. > As said, it really helps with user experience and it is > easy to implement by loading our already existing drivers. > > Cheers, Eric Now that RC4 is done. Some time and energy might get spent on luxury items. But, I’m probably going to take a couple days off first. Jerome > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
