Hi, I would like to comment on the method of first running a TESTER and then doing a conditional DEVICE=...
Personally I think that detecting the CPU level (8086, 286, 386, 486, 586) can be useful in automatic config selection. I also think that the kernel should auto-detect floating point support, as several BIOSes fail to initialize the FPU, so the OS should do so before the first FPU-using program is launched. On the other hand, I think that many drivers just skip loading if no suitable hardware is found anyway - for example most CD- ROM drivers do and UDMA2 does. First checking if there is some ATA/IDE CD-ROM drive and then, if yes, running VIDE-CDD would mean that you have to scan the bus twice, unnecessarily. Or you would have to pass the bus scan results to VIDE-CDD as command line options, of course. I would recommend to check WHICH device drivers would gain from the ability of running "if such hardware present then device=" style conditional load modes around them. I assume only a few do, and most of them would be DEVLOADable anyway, so you can do TESTER / IF errorlevel ... DEVLOAD DRIVER ... later in autoexec and do not have to do conditional stuff in config sys. Depending on which drivers are LEFT, we should decide about kernel abilities to run testers / about kernel built-in testers. I personally think that a CPU-level check would be enough, and a conditional DEVICE=... would be enough (i.e. no need for conditional versions of other config sys commands like INSTALL=), although a CPU-level-conditional SHELL line can be useful. On the other hand, I can write a wrapper which implements the latter as "if enough free XMS is present then run FreeCOM XMS swap, else run FreeCOM 8086 CALL /S version". So my suggestion is: Review the needs, and think about a new DEVICE variant CPUDEVICE[HIGH]=[minlevel],[maxlevel],[driver and args] or similar, where you could do for example CPUDEVICE=1,2,FDXMS286 ... CPUDEVICE=3,,HIMEM ... CPUDEVICE=3,,EMM386 ... (the CPUDEVICE command would be combineable with n?command=... style FreeDOS menu system, e.g. to select whether to try to load EMM386) Eric ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
