Hi Tom, the mails from Jack / Johnson actually do contain technical advice. Jack thinks that leaving interrupts disabled during a big XMS move means that interrupts from fast hardware like gigabit ethernet will be lost. So Jack recommends to split the big move into several smaller moves. Between those, the system would return to real mode (or if EMM386 is loaded to v86 mode) and interrupts can be enabled for a moment. As switching to and from protected mode is slow, it would be a good idea to make the maximum size of "XMS move with interrupts disabled" configurable - people without fast interrupt sources may want to do all XMS moves in one chunk, as FDXMS / HIMEM does, for maximum XMS speed. People with fast interrupt sources may want to do things QHIMEM style, with some IRQ windows during larger XMS moves.
Jack just want to warn about the "FDXMS/HIMEM interrupt not locking" simply need to change, yet a number of people go seize him!
I think we did not criticize the idea of allowing interrupts during XMS moves from time to time. The "flame" part of the mails was about other things.
why ellis thinks that this problem was caused by disabling interrupts, and how he solved it (it's probably not as easy as just leaving interrupts enabled)
See above - you cannot leave interrupts on all the time but an implementation in the style described above would not be very complex :-).
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/Softlib/MSLFILES/XMS.EXE
As Bart said,
http://freedos.sourceforge.net/freedos/news/press/2000-himem.txt
(1/2000 "HIMEM.SYS was open-sourced" which tells that MS offered a developer's kit, including XMS 2.0 HIMEM sources, back in 1989 and, later in the discussion, that there is that XMS.EXE which contains XMS 3.0 specs and driver sources... The copyright is simply "1988 MS" but only the SPECS are "public domain", but MS does not tell which license they want for the SOURCES... I guess one could ask them ;-)) ... so there still is a license problem. Arkady also said:
Though, there sayed about public domain for XMS spec (developed joinly by MS and Lotus), but sources in those archive are not (explicitly) clarified.
Eric PS: So I guess we can try out by letting QHIMEM gain popularity and waiting if MS cares ;-). Remember that even a "NEWDOS" site with a MS DOS 7 distro was online for several months before MS asked them to take the site offline again. MS is not very eager in reducing the availability of MS DOS boot disks, I would say. People would use OTHER DOSes otherwise, that kind of explains it. ------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
