On Sat, Jan 15, 2022 at 6:33 AM Jerome Shidel <jer...@shidel.net> wrote:
> [..] > We come to UEFI and modern hardware. With modern hardware vendors dropping > support for Legacy BIOS and users wanting to run FreeDOS on modern > machines, I only see three solutions. > > First… Oh well, they can run it in a virtual machine and we should no > longer worry about native hardware support. > > Second… I really haven’t looked into this one at all. But, I think it > would be possible to use Core Boot, SeaBios or something else to provide > Legacy BIOS support ourselves on UEFI only systems. This would be a good > deal of work. It also still leaves the problem of sound drivers and other > hardware support. This might also require some thin hardware emulation > layer. But, it should be doable. > > Third… Create a custom extremely slim Linux distro to boot the system and > provide basic hardware support. That OS would boot directly into a VM > platform like QEMU or DOSBox and run FreeDOS. Overall, I think this might > be the best option for UEFI only systems and modern hardware. > > It would provide support for sound and networking through Linux drivers. > It could be easily slowed down for older games. It could even be used to > run FreeDOS on non-x86 based hardware. Some of the disadvantages of doing > this would be the need to technically maintain two operating systems. Since > even the lite weight Linux distros are more bloat than we would want or > need, we would have to do our own. It would also require creating some > Linux programs to easily manage things on the host OS. > > Perhaps this should be done as a completely separate project from FreeDOS. > Something like a RetroPC project. However, their may already be such a > project in existence we could use. We could then either release a version > or just point people at it for modern hardware. > > This is an interesting idea, but I think it's best to do this outside the FreeDOS Project. A project like this would be useful to more things than just FreeDOS, so a separate project seems best. And that way we're not confusing "FreeDOS development" with "Linux development" or "UEFI development" or "VM development." Jim
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