Re: DOS Emulation KLD
Any comments or suggestions welcome. Fix doscmd, which does the emulation in userland (which is even better than running as a KLD). -- ... every activity meets with opposition, everyone who acts has his rivals and unfortunately opponents also. But not because people want to be opponents, rather because the tasks and relationships force people to take different points of view. [Dr. Fritz Todt] V I C T O R Y N O T V E N G E A N C E To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: DOS Emulation KLD
Any comments or suggestions welcome. Fix doscmd, which does the emulation in userland (which is even better than running as a KLD). What's wrong with doscmd ? I hadn't noticed this one used BSD filesystems in addition to image files. That was my #1 issue with some of the other emulators. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: DOS Emulation KLD
Any comments or suggestions welcome. Fix doscmd, which does the emulation in userland (which is even better than running as a KLD). What's wrong with doscmd ? I hadn't noticed this one used BSD filesystems in addition to image files. That was my #1 issue with some of the other emulators. It needs a lot of TLC; there are plenty of places where it could be usefully extended as well. One might also consider abandoning it entirely and making plex86 work, if one was really interested in that sort of thing. -- ... every activity meets with opposition, everyone who acts has his rivals and unfortunately opponents also. But not because people want to be opponents, rather because the tasks and relationships force people to take different points of view. [Dr. Fritz Todt] V I C T O R Y N O T V E N G E A N C E To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: DOS Emulation KLD
What's wrong with doscmd ? I hadn't noticed this one used BSD filesystems in addition to image files. That was my #1 issue with some of the other emulators. It needs a lot of TLC; there are plenty of places where it could be usefully extended as well. One might also consider abandoning it entirely and making plex86 work, if one was really interested in that sort of thing. Thanks for the information. I have alot of DOS programming experience, and although little BSD programming experience, I have read quite a bit and attended a 4.x KLD authoring conference at ToorCon. Since I understand low level DOS implementation (I've worked with the FreeDOS project too), I'm taking a look at doscmd and I'm going to try to contribute to this project. It seems delightfully simple in its design. I see some of the rough edges you're talking about, but I believe you're right, it's nothing a little TLC can't take care of. Thanks again for your help on the subject. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
DOS Emulation KLD
I've had this idea kicking around for some time, so I decided I would throw it out there and see if anyone was interested or had any ideas. I'm wondering why we can'twrite basic DOS emulation as a KLD. DOS programs are x86 code, a majority of it usually doing basic mundane (userland acceptable) things. The only problems would come about when interrupts were called and system memory locations were written to. It is my understanding that under x86-32 virtual machines, such instructions are "illegal" and therefore caught by the OS's virtual machine driver, and emulated. I think for basic int 21h services, and BIOS keyboard and text functions, this wouldn't be that difficult to do, and would allow simple text based DOS programs to run under FreeBSD. The DOS programs would see the file system in an 8.3 format, case insensitive, and would be able to use and save files without any real major modification. The same way VFAT handles long file names, DOS could handle FFS file names (eg: alongfilename.txt becomes alongf~1.txt). With the file system emulated, the basic interrupts caught and emulated, and everything else stubbed, many simple dos programs would function under FreeBSD. For example, although of course we have midnight commander, there is no real reason why the original Norton Commander could not run under FreeBSD. I'm not suggesting NC would be better than MC, but what I am suggesting is that a simple program like NC, which writes to the screen and manages files, should have no problem running in the BSD environment. I know there are emulation programs available in ports, but I was thinking along the lines of a KLD, which is automatically loaded when a DOS exe file is executed from the prompt. I'm going to look into this, and maybe with some help, draft a simple implementation to see if it's feasible. Any comments or suggestions welcome.
