Hello Corbin, > I'm really curious about the VirtualBox compatibility fixes, was there any > major changes? > Corbin >
Simple answer: Not really. :-) Long answer: The changes only effect VirtualBox. Real hardware and other Virtual Machines are unchanged. Really, really, really long answer: Basically, there were two issues with compatibility in VirtualBox. Neither, were bugs or problems in FDI or any of the utilities it relies upon. The first issue was the installed FDCONFIG.SYS default option 1 would cause the virtual machine to crash when loading JEMM. The second issue sprung up when creating a El Torito Boot CD. Basically, when booting even a stripped down version FreeDOS (more or less only the Kernel, FreeCOM and CD Driver), any program that would access the CD portion of the media caused VirtualBox to lockup. So, here was the solution. I added VirtualBox detection to the V8Power Tools vinfo utility. It already detects CPUs from 8086-80686, DOSBox, QEMU and general emulation. I added VirtualBox and VMware to it. I planned adding this detector since about Preview 13, I just finally got around to doing it. Next, the logic that creates the FDCONFIG.SYS file was already setup in Preview 16 to change the installed Default choice to Option 2. It was only waiting on the vinfo utility. Finally, there is no way to make the El Torito CD work under VirtualBox at present. This is not an issue with FDI. But, having the installer lockup part of the way into the process (when it access the CD portion) would create a very bad user experience. So, I made the best compromise I could. Under VirtualBox, if you boot the CD, the installer UI is never seen. You get a message telling you that it won’t work and to use one of the other installation media and a command prompt. Not perfect, but the best solution at present. This only is an issue under VirtualBox when booting the from the CD. No other virtual machine platforms exhibit this issue. No other method on VirtualBox does either. There is only one version of FDI for all media and it uses the same utilities. I’m not pointing a finger at VirtualBox. But, it is the primary suspect for the problem. Regardless of all of that, I have switched building of the FDI previews over to using VirtualBox. Originally, I was building them in VMware. But, VirtualBox is about 5 times faster in the build process. To build a release under VMware took about 15 minutes. Under VirtualBox about 3. The occasional rebuild of all of the package data information files used by FDIMPLES took about 90 minutes. Now, under VirtualBox 15 minutes. Thanks, Jerome ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Find and fix application performance issues faster with Applications Manager Applications Manager provides deep performance insights into multiple tiers of your business applications. It resolves application problems quickly and reduces your MTTR. Get your free trial! https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/302982198;130105516;z _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
