Hi, > The application is a very old network manager. > The obsolete communications device is a serial board.
> It is not, however, a typical serial board.? The serial board performs > certain functions of a proprietary protocol which is somewhat similar to > frame relay.? The interface to this board is not through a standard I/O > port (like 0x3f8) but is based on a shared memory area of frame buffers. Hmmm okay if you intend to keep using that actual board as real hardware, you should probably run dosemu as root or setuid and configure it to give direct access to the real board. As long as Linux does not try to use the board at the same time, that should work :-). Having DMA / IRQ with the board can give extra complexities, though. Hard to say which other ways of getting 128 byte data packets from A to B are good alternatives for your app or for a VM that would fake your communications board... The fact that the board does most of the lowlevel stuff might help though. > The application software knows nothing about the low level things > happening on the comms link - all it knows is that when it has a frame > to send it allocates a chunk of memory and when it sees a chunk of > memory appear in the receive queue area that is an incoming frame. If you can put the frame buffer location in normal DOS RAM then a TSR which copied frames over a normal network card packet driver might be an option - would work both in VM and on real hardware. You can use UMB areas, too. If you know how to program things in Linux then you can also put a simple driver on the dos side, for example pushing data through the virtual serial or parallel port or though the dosemu 0xe6 debugging channel and then let some clever Linux app do the transport over any sort of network of your choice on the other end. Dosemu typically uses ordinary device and pipe interfaces but for the fine details you better ask on the dosemu-devel list :-). > I took a look at QEMU and have a ways to go but the source > does not look all that big. Promising... > I was impressed at how quickly I got a Linux environment > running on my PC.. Who said Linux would be hard to install? Maybe even the opposite: As Windows comes preinstalled, people do not know that it is nontrivial to install, so Linux has to be very easy to install to avoid scaring people away :-) Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
