Hi Eric, You replied some time ago to a user that asked which BIOS services are required to support FreeDOS, could you (or anybody else) please list those services again. For some reason the link below is no longer valid.
Thanks Hans www.ht-lab.com Hi, the short answer is: YES. You can run FreeDOS on 8086. > is it possible that freeDOS work on an embedded system without BIOS? The answer for that is longer. Searching for "embed" on http://fd-doc.sourceforge.net/faq/cgi-bin/search.cgi will point you to: http://fd-doc.sourceforge.net/faq/cgi-bin/viewfaq.cgi?faq=./incoming/277 which explains which BIOS services you have to provide for a minimal FreeDOS install (in other words, services which are needed by the kernel itself - depending on which DOS programs you want to run, you may need additional BIOS parts loaded). Note that running FreeDOS on a pre-286 will use a lot of RAM. Normally, FreeDOS will move most of the kernel to HMA (right after the first 1 MB) and the FreeCOM shell will use XMS for swapping, so it only uses a small amount of DOS memory. As your 80186 has no HMA and no XMS, both the kernel and the FreeCOM command.com shell will have to use DOS memory for everthing, so I think only 400-500 kilobytes of DOS RAM will be free. On a 286 system, it is easy to have more than 600 kilobytes free with FreeDOS. On a 386 with EMM386 or another UMB driver loaded, you can even use dosdata=umb / loadhigh / devicehigh to get more than 620 kilobytes of the 640 kilobytes of DOS RAM free. Of course you will also be unable to do some 386-specific things, including: emm386, caching, dosfsck, booting from LBA FAT32 drives, himem (but you can use fdxms instead of himem if you have at least a 286 or newer processor). If EDIT or KEYB fail on your 80186, try EDIT 0.7d and MKEYB, which should work even on 8086. Or use no keyboard driver at all (if you use US keyboard layout). Let us know if you find other programs which do not work on 80186 processors. To get started, download the kernel and shell or a minimal boot disk from http://fdos.org/kernel/ - you should probably not use the big ISO distros (beta9sr2: 12 MB, Blair's full ISO: 120 MB). But you can use the ODIN one diskette distro with many preinstalled programs. Eric PS: Feel free to add corrections / ideas to the FAQ entry about 80186. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
