> On Apr 2, 2025, at 3:46 AM, Ben Russell via Freedos-devel
> <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>
> Tested the floppy installer in 86Box with an 80286 machine, the "[ISA] MR
> BIOS 286 clone" board (because I like having a BIOS setup menu and a PC/AT
> doesn't have one) with a 1200KB 5.25" floppy drive and a 1024:16:63 (504 MB)
> IDE hard drive.
>
> The readme says an EGA is required, so I intentionally disobeyed that
> instruction out of curiosity and emulated a CGA instead. No issues there.
> (But maybe this BIOS's CGA INT 10h handler is better than that of an IBM 5150
> BIOS.)
The installers (primary and floppy) rely on V8Power Tools. Those tools were
specifically created to make the Primary installer (FDI) possible. At the time
only CD and USB media were provided. USB was not available until much later
than 386 based hardware and our CD drivers need at least a 386. Therefore, the
Primary install is not going to be run on anything less than a 386. By that
time, most systems had VGA or better. Later the Floppy edition of FreeDOS was
introduced for the first time. While V8Power Tools only needed a 8086, some
parts of those tools assumed at a bare minimum EGA was present. Since the early
days, V8Power Tools has had a little work done to support lesser video cards.
But, support for those displays is almost completely untested.
>
> For my first attempt, it turns out that 512 KB of RAM is not enough, 640 KB
> seems to be needed. (Or maybe the first attempt at installing fails and one
> needs to try again.) The error I got with 512 KB RAM was:
>
> FATAL ERROR: error code #2, unspecified error with "DOC\KERNEL\Z6B37QYM.GZ"
> Failed.
Interesting…
Error#2 is likely "file not found”
Based on your message, this error would be after the file was extracted from
the diskette archive and before/duiring decompression.
> It happened after the "FreeDOS is an open source DOS-compatible operating
> system that you can use to..." blurb after putting the first non-boot disk in.
>
> (Another metric is I went with 6 MHz at first, but then bumped it up to 25
> MHz for the second attempt as the speed was painful. Not sure if that would
> have been the issue though, but mentioning it for completeness.)
FreeDOS is big. Really big. The very basic core is nearly 10 times the size of
MS-DOS. There were a number of complaints on the total number diskettes
required. So, file compression was incorporated into the Floppy Edition to cut
the number of disks roughly in half. But on hardware less than a 386,
decompression is slow and there are I/O bottlenecks. So, it is a trade off
between performance and twice the number of required diskettes.
I have never benchmarked the difference of install time on sub-386 hardware
between the compressed vs doubled disks. Since floppies are very slow, the
difference may be negligible.
> For some reason, the installer says "Install FreeDOS files for 386." despite
> it being a 286. After some digging, it seems that, when the TTAGS variable is
> being set (which is the one responsible for displaying that message), it
> forces the CPU detection to report a 386 at a bare minimum.
This dates back to a bug that was in V8Power Tools. Some 486 machines (not all
486s), were being reported as a 186. I spent a lot of time going over the
detection algorithms up to a 486 and could not see the issue. Eventually, I
located the issue. A simple typographical error. After passing the 486 test,
but not passing the CPUID instruction test, report CPU as 1. That being the
value for a 186. Ugh.
While the bug existed for a while, the Floppy Edition was updated to assume
that anything less than a 386 was in error. This assumption could (and can
still be) overridden through command line options when launching the installer.
After the bug was fixed, I thought I removed that assumption from installer.
But, I just looked and it is still there. So, I either forgot t remove it or
the source got reverted to an earlier version.
Simply changing line 485 and removing lines 483,484,500-504 will remove the
automatic CPU override. I just made this change and updated the sources.
The questions becomes:
Does it get fixed now and build a fresh 1.4-GM?
Or, let the CPU override stand until future builds of the OS?
If the override remains, the installed OS will get a few 386 programs that
cannot be used on a 286. Also, it will get the 386 config files instead of
those suited for a 286. The will require some manual editing of the boot files.
While it would be nice to provide the change, I don’t know if this alone
warrants a fresh 1.4-GM build.
> [..]
:-)
Jerome
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