Hi Eric, > On Jul 1, 2021, at 8:47 AM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > > > Hello Jerome, > >> A while back, a user posted a bug report >> https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/bugs/235/ >> that claims two separate programs (Dillo and MPlayer) >> destroyed their FAT32 partition during usage. >> >> Does anyone have any information on if this is a bug? Or, do you >> think it was a problem specifically related to that single user and >> possible caused by hardware running them from USB? Or, something else >> entirely? >> >> Thanks for any feedback you can provide in that bug report. > > I can only give an educated guess here, but: > > Dillo and Mplayer both are apps which use DOS > extenders and protected mode. I do not expect > Mplayer to write to disk, but Dillo probably > writes to a cache on disk? It would be good to > know whether disk writes are necessary to cause > the problem. Would using a RAMDISK as the cache > or TEMP directory for Dillo avoid the issue? > > It could be that USB BIOS disk writes somehow > get messed up when DOS apps running in protected > mode access the disk, or to be more exact, ask > the DOS kernel to access the disk. > > This can depend on many factors, such as which > drivers are loaded in which order. According to > Jack, loading UHDD before EMM386 (JEMMEX, JEMM386) > can help to reduce DMA issues by letting UHDD do > the DMA instead of a possibly less stable BIOS, > for example. Of course USB is a different story, > but I can easily imagine that whether you do or > do not load EMM386 at all will make a difference > for the problem described in bug ticket 235. > > In few cases, a BIOS will not allow USB writes at > all after booting from USB, but because the bug > specifically mentions Dillo and Mplayer, my best > guess would be "this is related to protected mode > apps trying to access USB disks". > > Eric :-)
Thanks for you Guesses. If you feel up to it, maybe post some suggestions to the bug report. Thanks :-) Jerome _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
