Hi Arkady!

> (Clear high parts of 32bit regs...)
> How this relates to DOS?

MS DOS basically had no 386 stuff at all (except EMM386). In FreeDOS,
however, people run 386 aware programs more often. Those leave non-zero
values in 32 bit registers when they exit, and the next program which you
start...

Whatever. You are right. Very bad programming practice to expect the high
parts of the 32 bit registers to have some value. I close that "bug report"
then.

Lawrence comments that this only affected an old version of the
GRDB debugger.

Check out my comment and program on
http://www.freedos.org/bugs/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1630

> EA> If it would be DOS4GW then we would be really motivated :-).
>      ...to built DOS4GW into kernel? You joke.

I meant "if DOS4GW had problems with FreeDOS because FreeDOS does not
clear high parts of 32 bit registers on exec then we should probably
clear high parts of 32 bit registers on exec"... But now that only an
old GRDB is affected, I simply marked the bug as RESOLVED WONTFIX.

> EA> You just said that BIOS would handle it and that equipment list can handle
> EA> up to four drives as well. So why would we need a driver sys for it? And I
...
>      Because MS-DOS need it. From first versions there was reserved only two
> letters for floppy drivers, and we can/should not change this. Especially,
> programs with two controllers very rare...

I see no convincing technical reason why FreeDOS should not auto-detect the
"more than 2 floppy drives exist" case instead of forcing the user to use
clumsy driver.sys manually instead... On the other hand I see no reason why
we should support a third floppy drive AT ALL. Almost no still existing and
working computer has one. Do we need to change the FreeDOS Manifesto in order
to drop DRIVPARM / DRIVER.SYS plans? Are there other devices for which DRIVPARM
and DRIVER.SYS would be actually useful? Apart from pre-286 floppy / tape 
drives with broken BIOS support or similar stuff?

> EA> do indeed suggest to make driver sys a kernel builtin if we need it...
>      This is not bug report, but wish.

Yes, but we have no "Wishzilla" available. Only Bugzilla. If you want a
better separation of bugs and wishes, we could enable the Sourceforge
wish / helpdesk / buglist system again partially (i.e. activate only the
wish database part of it. For helpdesk, people should go to FAQ and for
bugs they should use Bugzilla).

<-- COMMENTS, Jim?

>      My (old) computer have no APM support.
FDAPM does not need APM. If you have it, FDAPM can use it. If not, no problem.
All x86 CPUs have the HLT instruction...
Things which you can do without APM with FDAPM: turn VGA on/off, spin IDE
harddisks down (SPINDOWN command), save energy with help of HLT instruction,
using APMDOS command, show statistics about that energy saving TSR mode,
reboot through "out 64,fe" / through "jmp ffff:0" / through "int 19".

> EA> About bug 1789, kernel confused by PKZIP-builtin format command
>      Which URL?
http://www.freedos.org/bugs/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1789
possibly fixed by you:
http://www.mail-archive.com/freedos-kernel%40lists.sourceforge.net/msg00956.html

the ret / ret 8 issue in fl_lba_ReadWrite (when did that bug get INTRODUCED?
Maybe I better downgrade to some older kernel / upgrade to a CVS kernel???).

(Poor Matija / Tom / Bart spam-bot-wise, but you needed the URL of bug 1789...)

Eric



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