Hi Jim,
as several people reported SIGSEGV / page faults with MINIBOX,
for example MINIBOX PWD or MINIBOX CLEAR, I wondered whether
the crashes are just a symptom of the EMM386 issues discussed
earlier. Or rather: Some VMWARE problem causing problems FOR
EMM386. On which real or virtual hardware are you testing?
You might have missed the note in my email where I said I even tried
booting FreeDOS without anything loaded (no FDCONFIG or AUTOEXEC) and
still got those errors:
*And to test that nothing else was getting in the way, I booted my
system without a FDCONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC, and still getting these
errors.
I have not missed that note. That is why I explicitly said:
"Some VMWARE problem causing problems FOR EMM386" and later
explained that everything somehow touching protected mode
can be affected by such issues.
*It would be good to know whether MINIBOX works on bare metal*
*And it would be good to know which other 32-bit apps fail*
If you do not load HIMEM and EMM386, the GO32 DOS extender
used by MINIBOX will have to enter protected mode and find
suitable memory areas to allocate without help of EMM386
and/or HIMEM, but it will still be using protected mode.
So while you can say the problem is not caused directly by
EMM386 or HIMEM, it can still be caused by some hardware or
firmware problem of your real or virtual hardware which
triggers problems for both MINIBOX and EMM386.
As said, the current wave of complaints about EMM386 (I use
the name as a general category: JEMM, JEMMEX, JEMM386 etc.)
can easily be just another symptom of the same problem which
also is behind the current wave of "MINIBOX just crashes for
me" complaints.
Because BOTH minibox and emm386, as well as many other apps
with DOS extender use, need *protected mode and memory maps*
to be reliable, while others will not need such stability.
The EMM386 discussion claimed that removing NOEMS helps, but
I claim it may only help a bit: The same region which falsely
was considered as safe for UMB will now be considered safe
for EMS page frame, but if it really is unsafe (for example
colliding with some reserved area not properly reported as
such by BIOS or similar!) you will just "stay alive" longer,
as long as you do not use the EMS page frame for anything.
In protected mode apps, you gain access to even more memory
areas - possibly including more reserved areas which have
not properly been flagged as such by the BIOS etc.
Regards, Eric
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