[Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
In reply to : Eric Auer e.a...@de Realising I left away this point of your previous msg : Someone, maybe not Eric, asked what I have been using for accessing USB mass storage in DOS. Answer : a version of Panasonic's USBASPI.SYS. This allows access to 4k sectors using SCSI commands. Interesting, but would that be easier than using Bret's or Georg's USB storage drivers? I had a look at Bret's open source USB drivers, unfortunately they only support Intel/Via (UHCI) controllers yet. I also think they have hard coded 512 bytes per sector. In any case I only own non-Intel based (OHCI/EHCI) so can't use or test Bret's fine work. Haven't looked at Georg's drivers, which are not free/open anyway and annoyingly, the non paid for versions stop working after a few minutes IIUW. As long as somebody explains me how to write and read 4k sectors with those drivers, I should be able to show how to show 512 sectors and a transformed BPB on the DOS side, in that way making FAT32 partitions on that disk useable by unpatched FreeDOS with a simple loadable block device driver in a safe* way. I had success with Panasonic's USBASPI driver, specifically the non official 2.27x USBASPI.SYS (15,491 bytes dieted DOS driver) extracted from : http://www.mdgx.com/files/USBEXFAT.ZIP The download also contains other drivers which you may find interesting, including an USBASPI.EXE (untried by me). I'm making no representations or comment on the legality etc... but this is for education pruposes right ? The thing works for me, provides full ASPI access to the 4K sectors (32bit LBA support) I also made limited experiments with modding the block driver DIDD1000.SYS - the included int 13h provider is easily fixed, but the DOS block device driver proper would require much more disassembling and study than I could afford. Instead efforts should be devoted to writing an open source version. *I cannot stop you from breaking the wonder by reformatting that partition in a non-4k-compatible way, apart from write-protecting the boot sector. You cannot repartition disks through block device drivers anyway, so THAT part is safe. Also, DOSFSCK will be happy (will not notice anything strange) and CHKDSK skips FAT32 anyway. I look forward to seeing a demo from you and hearing from the rest of the gang too ... -- Czerno -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
I had a look at Bret's open source USB drivers, unfortunately they only support Intel/Via (UHCI) controllers yet. True. Working on that. I also think they have hard coded 512 bytes per sector. No. USBDRIVE reads the maximum buffer size from the DOS List of Lists (as discussed some earlier in the thread), and uses that as its maximum sector size. If a USB disk has 4k sectors, but DOS can only handle 512 byte sectors, USBDRIVE won't load the disk. If DOS can handle (buffer) 4k sectors OK, USBDRIVE will load it and automatically mount any FAT partitions it finds. Also as stated earlier, I don't personally have any disks with sector sizes other than 512, so this has never been tested (at least by me) on a real system. That's why you need to modify the kernel to handle 4k sectors, also as discussed earlier (at least with my drivers). Based on what Eric says, though, that doesn't work with the FreeDOS kernel. Because USBDRIVE provides an INT 13h interface, you can also use external drivers to mount/access the non-FAT partitions that may be on the USB disks (NTFS, EXTx, exFAT, ...). USBDRIVE won't mount non-FAT drives automatically, though. -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
The advantage of a write-delay cache is that that the writing can be done when the system is idle (a simple form of multi-tasking). That counts as advanced cache with a lot of code and can go as far as a sort of ramdisk which syncs back to the harddisk slowly but steadily when the harddisk has time, in big cache. And it is not what I would suggest for DOS... That's basically what SMARTDRV and its equivalents do, though in a limited sense (they don't use oodles of memory and cache/RAMDisk the entire hard drive). Are you saying that you don't think programs like SMARTDRV belong in DOS? -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Re-%3A-Support-for-4k-byte-sectors-tp33144850p33162629.html Sent from the FreeDOS - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
In reply to: Bret Johnson bretjohn@ju... only support Intel/Via (UHCI) controllers yet. True. Working on that. Great :=) I also think they have hard coded 512 bytes per sector. No. USBDRIVE reads the maximum buffer size from the DOS List of Lists (as discussed some earlier in the thread), and uses that as its maximum sector size. If a USB disk has 4k sectors, but DOS can only handle 512 byte sectors, USBDRIVE won't load the disk. If DOS can handle (buffer) 4k sectors OK, USBDRIVE will load it and automatically mount any FAT partitions it finds. TY for the heads-up. Also as stated earlier, I don't personally have any disks with sector sizes other than 512, so this has never been tested (at least by me) on a real system. It would be a good thing if someone on the list having access to such a device /and/ Intel-based USB would experiment and report their findings... That's why you need to modify the kernel to handle 4k sectors, also as discussed earlier (at least with my drivers). Based on what Eric says, though, that doesn't work with the FreeDOS kernel. As I noted earlier, I'm sure the default disk driver MS DOS kernels can handle bigger sectors, /but/ there are problems to be fixed - as pointed to me by R. Loew, and I verified it too : MSDOS init module (patition scanner) discards partitions whose boot sectors indicate any sector size other than 512. Disks operated through user drivers (config.sys) should not be so limited. While trying a free fix for MSDOS could be attempted - but is the effort worth it ? - I would vote for FreeDOS to be enhanced. Does someone here know if DR/Open DOS recognises 512k sectors, either or both with its built-in disk driver and user drivers ? Because USBDRIVE provides an INT 13h interface, you can also use external drivers to mount/access the non-FAT partitions that may be on the USB disks (NTFS, EXTx, exFAT, ...). USBDRIVE won't mount non-FAT drives automatically, though. Understood. Regards -- Czerno -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
is this too simplistic or what (?): you could reformat ntfs and use a freeware reader, or reformat the whole hard drive and then use that... or i've had excellent luck with USBASPI.SYS 2.27 + DI1000DD.SYS (links below). http://panasonic.jp/com/support/drive/other/f2h_usb.html http://www.hiren.info/download/dos-files/di1000dd.sys eufdp...@yahoo.com eufdp...@yahoo.com eufdp...@yahoo.com eufdp...@yahoo.com eufdp...@yahoo.com From: Bertho Grandpied y31415926...@yahoo.fr To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 1:46 PM Subject: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors In reply to: Bret Johnson bretjohn@ju... only support Intel/Via (UHCI) controllers yet. True. Working on that. Great :=) I also think they have hard coded 512 bytes per sector. No. USBDRIVE reads the maximum buffer size from the DOS List of Lists (as discussed some earlier in the thread), and uses that as its maximum sector size. If a USB disk has 4k sectors, but DOS can only handle 512 byte sectors, USBDRIVE won't load the disk. If DOS can handle (buffer) 4k sectors OK, USBDRIVE will load it and automatically mount any FAT partitions it finds. TY for the heads-up. Also as stated earlier, I don't personally have any disks with sector sizes other than 512, so this has never been tested (at least by me) on a real system. It would be a good thing if someone on the list having access to such a device /and/ Intel-based USB would experiment and report their findings... That's why you need to modify the kernel to handle 4k sectors, also as discussed earlier (at least with my drivers). Based on what Eric says, though, that doesn't work with the FreeDOS kernel. As I noted earlier, I'm sure the default disk driver MS DOS kernels can handle bigger sectors, /but/ there are problems to be fixed - as pointed to me by R. Loew, and I verified it too : MSDOS init module (patition scanner) discards partitions whose boot sectors indicate any sector size other than 512. Disks operated through user drivers (config.sys) should not be so limited. While trying a free fix for MSDOS could be attempted - but is the effort worth it ? - I would vote for FreeDOS to be enhanced. Does someone here know if DR/Open DOS recognises 512k sectors, either or both with its built-in disk driver and user drivers ? Because USBDRIVE provides an INT 13h interface, you can also use external drivers to mount/access the non-FAT partitions that may be on the USB disks (NTFS, EXTx, exFAT, ...). USBDRIVE won't mount non-FAT drives automatically, though. Understood. Regards -- Czerno -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
Op 18-1-2012 20:15, Mark Brown schreef: is this too simplistic or what (?): you could reformat ntfs and use a freeware reader, or reformat the whole hard drive and then use that... or i've had excellent luck with USBASPI.SYS 2.27 + DI1000DD.SYS (links below). How would your suggestion be a solution to the problem at hand? What is desired is a solution to both read and write sectors of 4K size each, due to some silly hardware USB bridge using it. Formatting something as NTFS doesn't guarantee a proper working on such a USB bridge. Besides, using a reader implies no writing. -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
Op 18-1-2012 17:11, Bret Johnson schreef: I had a look at Bret's open source USB drivers, unfortunately they only support Intel/Via (UHCI) controllers yet. True. Working on that. That's promising, even to see if your drivers can really make FDISK work. I probably should prepare a bootdisk image for you that hides all physical/int13 drives, then loads your USB driver, then tries to execute FDISK. My only way of trying UHCI driver is by running inside VMware, and then your driver doesn't seem to succeed due to some IRQ issue. Might be a VM bug for that matter. QEMU also has USB support but can only connect devices if you run QEMU under Linux, which means I still can't test much as I run QEMU under Windows. -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 2:23 PM, Bernd Blaauw bbla...@home.nl wrote: Formatting something as NTFS doesn't guarantee a proper working on such a USB bridge. Besides, using a reader implies no writing. I use NTFS under Windows. Mark Russinovitch offered a freeware NTFS *reader* for DOS through his old Sysinternals site, and a payware driver that could also *write* to NTFS from DOS through the sister Winternals site. (It was intended for rescue operations on NTFS filesystems from DOS.) I'm not sure how thrilled I'd be at trying to use NTFS as the native file system on a DOS machine (aside from the philosophical questions about whether it's still a DOS system if you do...). I wouldn't mind a driver that would let me read ext2/3/4 file systems under Linux from DOS, since FreeDOS is installed on a partition on a box that has Linux, too, but I'd hardly expect FreeDOS to run on top of a Linux FS. __ Dennis -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
That's promising, even to see if your drivers can really make FDISK work. Trust me, it works. I've partitioned many USB disks from DOS, though I normally use Ranish Partition Manager instead of FDISK (it's MUCH easier to use, and will also format the partitions). I know MS FDISK will crash in some cases with USBDRIVE, but that's actually a bug in MS FDISK that doesn't understand removable hard drives. For example, if you have USBDRIVE configured for 3 INT 13h Disk Numbers (controlled with the /Disks:# option), but only have 1 USB disk actually plugged in, MS FDISK will crash. If you have USBDRIVE configured for the same number of disks that are actually plugged in, MS FDISK works OK. I don't think FreeDOS FDISK has this problem, and I know Ranish works OK. ... My only way of trying UHCI driver is by running inside VMware, and then your driver doesn't seem to succeed due to some IRQ issue. Might be a VM bug for that matter. Probably. USB under VM's is generally flaky. Also, USB support under VM's (at least correctly designed VM's) shouldn't really be necessary, anyway. The important USB devices (mice, keyboards, disks, network cards) should be emulated by the VM at some other level already (mice and keyboards should be emulated as PS2 devices, disks should appear as some sort of network drive or somehow mounted directly, network devices should be emulated as some sort of generic network card like an NE2000). At least in theory, USB joysticks should be emulated as standard game port joysticks as well, though I don't know if any VM's actually emulate joysticks. From a practical perspective, DOS USB support is more applicable to real hardware than virtualized. -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
I use NTFS under Windows. Mark Russinovitch offered a freeware NTFS *reader* for DOS through his old Sysinternals site, and a payware driver that could also *write* to NTFS from DOS through the sister Winternals site. (It was intended for rescue operations on NTFS filesystems from DOS.) There are a few of different NTFS utilities for DOS, including the Winternals ones. I've only had limited success with the ones I've tried, and wouldn't recommend any of them very highly. It certainly doesn't help that NTFS is 100% proprietary, or that there are also several different revisions of NTFS. I'm not sure how thrilled I'd be at trying to use NTFS as the native file system on a DOS machine (aside from the philosophical questions about whether it's still a DOS system if you do...). I'm not sure anybody's even considering booting DOS from anything other than FAT. But, it's really nice to be able to access from DOS the non-boot partitions on a hard drive, or external drives like USB, that are formatted with NTFS or EXTx or exFAT or whatever. I wouldn't mind a driver that would let me read ext2/3/4 file systems under Linux from DOS, since FreeDOS is installed on a partition on a box that has Linux, too, but I'd hardly expect FreeDOS to run on top of a Linux FS. Is anybody even working on a EXTx driver for DOS? I know I've heard of a few people experimenting with exFAT, but haven't heard of anything actually being released. -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Re-%3A-Support-for-4k-byte-sectors-tp33163231p33164647.html Sent from the FreeDOS - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
Hi, On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 4:31 PM, BretJ bretj...@juno.com wrote: I use NTFS under Windows. Mark Russinovitch offered a freeware NTFS *reader* for DOS through his old Sysinternals site, and a payware driver that could also *write* to NTFS from DOS through the sister Winternals site. (It was intended for rescue operations on NTFS filesystems from DOS.) There are a few of different NTFS utilities for DOS, including the Winternals ones. I've only had limited success with the ones I've tried, and wouldn't recommend any of them very highly. I only tried one or two very very briefly years ago. IIRC, one of them was ridiculously slow, and the other was very buggy. It's probably a stretch to expect NTFS to work well in FreeDOS. Most people would say, Just use Linux. (Dumb but admittedly decent workaround.) However, NTFS is fairly ubiquitous, similarly to ext2. It certainly doesn't help that NTFS is 100% proprietary, or that there are also several different revisions of NTFS. In fairness, I think a lot of security features would be compromised if they totally opened it up. Not saying I agree, of course, but NTFS is admittedly meant to do a lot more than FAT. This also may be why they have shifted away from booting from FAT. (rant excised) I wouldn't mind a driver that would let me read ext2/3/4 file systems under Linux from DOS, since FreeDOS is installed on a partition on a box that has Linux, too, but I'd hardly expect FreeDOS to run on top of a Linux FS. Is anybody even working on a EXTx driver for DOS? I know I've heard of a few people experimenting with exFAT, but haven't heard of anything actually being released. exFAT is patented, so is VFAT (sadly). MS knows this and milks it to death. I wouldn't recommend such tech for that reason alone. However, ext2 from Linux would be interesting for us, but no, I don't think anybody is working on it. We'd probably honestly have to hire someone a la Kickstarter. Benjamin David Lunt's hobby OS (FYSOS) seems to have a billion file systems, so quite honestly, he would be a good candidate (heavy dreaming here). Or perhaps the TestDisk dude, Christophe Grenier. http://www.fysnet.net/fysos.htm http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk How would you even do it? It's been (briefly) discussed before. 32-bit TSR? JLM? Network redirector interface (similar to ISO9660)?? (Dunno!) Typical workaround (besides Just use Linux, ugh) is LTOOLS, but that didn't work for me at all last I tried, and that's not exactly a native, bootable solution anyways. -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 5:31 PM, BretJ bretj...@juno.com wrote: I use NTFS under Windows. Mark Russinovitch offered a freeware NTFS *reader* for DOS through his old Sysinternals site, and a payware driver that could also *write* to NTFS from DOS through the sister Winternals site. (It was intended for rescue operations on NTFS filesystems from DOS.) There are a few of different NTFS utilities for DOS, including the Winternals ones. I've only had limited success with the ones I've tried, and wouldn't recommend any of them very highly. It certainly doesn't help that NTFS is 100% proprietary, or that there are also several different revisions of NTFS. Yeah, Linux support has been laboriously reverse engineered. And the revisions are problematic. Vista/Win7, for example, support Honest-to-God symlinks as well as the hard links supported under 2K/XP. I could actually use those in Windows, but symlinks alone aren't sufficient to justify an upgrade. I'm not sure how thrilled I'd be at trying to use NTFS as the native file system on a DOS machine (aside from the philosophical questions about whether it's still a DOS system if you do...). I'm not sure anybody's even considering booting DOS from anything other than FAT. But, it's really nice to be able to access from DOS the non-boot partitions on a hard drive, or external drives like USB, that are formatted with NTFS or EXTx or exFAT or whatever. It would indeed, but I'm not exactly holding my breath waiting. I have Win2K on the box FreeDOS is on, and found an open source extFS driver that reads/writes the ext4 filesystems I use on the Linux instances, and 2K has native FAT32 support, so I'm covered there. I wouldn't mind a driver that would let me read ext2/3/4 file systems under Linux from DOS, since FreeDOS is installed on a partition on a box that has Linux, too, but I'd hardly expect FreeDOS to run on top of a Linux FS. Is anybody even working on a EXTx driver for DOS? I know I've heard of a few people experimenting with exFAT, but haven't heard of anything actually being released. I don't know of anyone doing so, but I haven't actually looked. If I'm in FreeDOS, my need to actually *read* an FS other than FAT is small, and I can live without it. If I need to get to the NTFS or Ext4 slices, I'll boot into an OS that can. __ Dennis -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
Hi Bret, The advantage of a write-delay cache is that that the writing can be done when the system is idle (a simple form of multi-tasking). That counts as advanced cache with a lot of code and can go as far as a sort of ramdisk which syncs back to the harddisk slowly but steadily when the harddisk has time, in big cache. And it is not what I would suggest for DOS... That's basically what SMARTDRV and its equivalents do, though in a limited sense (they don't use oodles of memory and cache/RAMDisk the entire hard drive). Are you saying that you don't think programs like SMARTDRV belong in DOS? I am saying that for gaining speed on modern disks, in particular flash disk ands large sector disks, you should already make a big difference with a small pooling cache and a short delay, which is both simpler and less risky than large, long delay caches where a lot of hooks try to find out when a good moment to write is and a last safe moment to write, e.g. before reboot, before crash? or before you return to the prompt, as many users assume it is safe to switch off a DOS PC while it is idle at the prompt. My suggestion would be similar to the DR DOS / NWCACHE write pool function, with a maximum write delay of for example 1/4 to 1/2 of a second. The maximum allowed in NWCACHE is 5000 msec, granularity are timer ticks of 55 msec and a document about NWCACHE says that delayed writes are off by default because they have compatibility risks :-p The same NWCACHE document also explains an effect called deferred writes with write combining: If you write the same sector several times in a short time, or quickly write consecutive sectors, the writes result in only one, in the consecutive case larger, write instead of multiple small ones or multiple same-sector writes :-) This document also implies that write-combining of consecutive or same-sector writes happens inside the same buffer which is also used for read-ahead, called the lookahead buffer which can be max 16 kB and defaults to 9 kB. Probably for reading a whole diskette track whenever you read any sector from that track. The size 9 kB does not ring a bell for me in harddisk terms. This thing differs from another option where you can use the WHOLE cache memory of a few megabytes for writes that are delayed up to at most 5 seconds. So... If anybody has NWCACHE (ask me if needed) they could try if NWCACHE with 555 msec delay and 16 kb lookahead / write-combining buffer and delayed/deferred/combined/pooled/whatever writes on is already making a quite nice difference in write speed, eg. on USB and when working with many small files :-) Regards, Eric -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
I am saying that for gaining speed on modern disks, in particular flash disk ands large sector disks, you should already make a big difference with a small pooling cache and a short delay, That's true -- but I don't think either LBACACHE or UIDE actually do that. I could be wrong, but I think they are very simple write-through caches that don't delay or try to pool/combine any of the writes at all. If they did, and also added support for non-INT 13h disks, it could indeed make a HUGE difference. which is both simpler and less risky than large, long delay caches where a lot of hooks try to find out when a good moment to write is and a last safe moment to write, e.g. before reboot, before crash? or before you return to the prompt, as many users assume it is safe to switch off a DOS PC while it is idle at the prompt. Less risky, at least if the system is unstable. Actually only a little simpler, though, since any kind of delay at all, no matter how small, requires monitoring reboots and prompts. In all cases, it should be OK to shut off the system at a prompt. All caches, including SMARTDRV, must commit their write-delay caches before the DOS prompt returns. I personally have an OFF.BAT file to shut down my computers instead of using the power switch, anyway, and it makes sure everything is flushed and committed. Handling crashes is another story -- no way to handle those in any OS unless you use a journaling file system. -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Support for 4k byte sectors
Hi Eric, So... If anybody has NWCACHE (ask me if needed) they could try if NWCACHE with 555 msec delay and 16 kb lookahead / write-combining buffer and delayed/deferred/combined/pooled/whatever writes on is already making a quite nice difference in write speed, eg. on USB and when working with many small files :-) Alright, I'll use NWCACHE (instead of UIDE) for a couple of weeks. If I notice anything different, I'll report back. This is the command line: C:\DRDOS\nwcache.exe /DELAY=555 /BL=16 And this is the message: +-+ | Cache size: 7670 KB (XMS) | | Minimum cache size: 2048 KB | | Write-through drives: A B | | Delayed write drives: C D | +-+ | Current options:| | /MU Program is loaded into upper memory| | /BL=16 Lookahead buffer is in conventional memory, size is in KB | | /LEND=ON Lend memory to other applications - 5622 KB available | | /DELAY=555 Write delay is enabled, time is in milliseconds| | /FLUSH=ONFlush delayed writes before returning the prompt | +-+ Marcos -- Marcos Fávero Florence de Barros Campinas, Brazil -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Support for 4k byte sectors
Hi, It's been a while since I've used DR-DOS, mostly due to the floppy drive on that machine not working. I never moved it to any other machine as I didn't see the point (though vaguely considered it). It's kinda old and has some hardcoded limits. I don't remember exactly how much total RAM that NWCACHE can use. It's not much, obviously, esp. compared to UIDE. That alone might make it hard to compare the two. Also, IIRC, some things didn't like /LEND=ON, but maybe I'm misremembering. I'm not saying it isn't interesting, but using it for a few weeks isn't a good test. I don't know of any good disk / file benchmarks, though. For me, I'd probably just recompile something with DJGPP (once with each cache) via redir -t or runtime similar, e.g. TDE, which is simple to build. Or maybe some compression program (Info-Zip, p7zip, zpaq, etc) on the Calgary Corpus or similar test suite. On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 6:42 PM, Marcos Favero Florence de Barros fav...@mpcnet.com.br wrote: So... If anybody has NWCACHE (ask me if needed) they could try if NWCACHE with 555 msec delay and 16 kb lookahead / write-combining buffer and delayed/deferred/combined/pooled/whatever writes on Alright, I'll use NWCACHE (instead of UIDE) for a couple of weeks. If I notice anything different, I'll report back. C:\DRDOS\nwcache.exe /DELAY=555 /BL=16 +-+ | Cache size: 7670 KB (XMS) | | Minimum cache size: 2048 KB | | Write-through drives: A B | | Delayed write drives: C D | +-+ | Current options: | | /MU Program is loaded into upper memory | | /BL=16 Lookahead buffer is in conventional memory, size is in KB | | /LEND=ON Lend memory to other applications - 5622 KB available | | /DELAY=555 Write delay is enabled, time is in milliseconds | | /FLUSH=ON Flush delayed writes before returning the prompt | +-+ -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Big bootable disk for CD
Hi Alain, Bernd, Eric: I followed the instructions below from Alain, using my Fedora 14 (Linux) box. I didn't have 100% success but I am much closer! I created an image file in the manner described below. I wondered where to find command.com and kernel.sys...so I downloaded the FreeDOS iso for 1.1 and found those files in the one disk folder. I copied them to my image and then copied over my BIOS update files which are packaged in a directory. However I ran into trouble at Step 8: specifically, I couldn't figure out how to independently generate an isolinux folder or where to find isolinux to start with. So I copied over the ISOLINUX folder I found inside the FreeDOS 1.1 iso, and did some experimenting with the arguments to mkisofs. This got me a nice small iso image which I burned to CD. I then booted from this cd and got...the FreeDOS 1.1 installation screen in all its glory! In Alain's recipe below, it is not obvious to me how the FreeDOS.img file is connected to isolinux. I played with the tab key to see the boot arguments for the CD I made, and I get the impression that FreeDOS.img would be treated as the initrd= argument to isolinux. Am I right about that? In other words, isolinux takes the FreeDOS.img file, loads it into memory, and then passes control to it? Clearly, I need to read up more about using isolinux. I am very grateful to all of you for your help and advice. I'm making progress! Bob On 1/17/12 2:27 PM, Alain Mouette wrote: I have done this some time ago, it may help. It is for CD, but it would be nice to convert it to SD-card... Alain Em 15-06-2011 11:51, Alain Mouette escreveu: How can I make a big (6Mb) bootable image to use in the CD? This is the only part of the CD that I can read on *any* machine, I am using isolinux) With lots of help fom Eric Auer, I managed to make a bootable image with FreeDOS. Here is how I did it: 1) Program needed: NASM, which I got from Debian $ sudo apt-get install nasm 2) program from Eric for the boot sector: http://ericauer.cosmodata.virtuaserver.com.br/soft/specials/sys-freedos-linux.zip create a directory ./sys-freedos-linux and expand it there 3) create file of the right size. 5760k was ok for me, there is some magic in the size and not everything will be ok. (more studies needed) $ dd if=/dev/zero of=FreeDOS.img count=11520 11520+0 records in 11520+0 records out 5898240 bytes (5.9 MB) copied, 0.408512 s, 14.4 MB/s 4) Prepare it with a FAT file system $ sudo mkdosfs -v FreeDOS.img mkdosfs 3.0.1 (23 Nov 2008) FreeDOS.img has 64 heads and 32 sectors per track, logical sector size is 512, using 0xf8 media descriptor, with 11520 sectors; file system has 2 12-bit FATs and 4 sectors per cluster. FAT size is 9 sectors, and provides 2867 clusters. Root directory contains 512 slots. Volume ID is 0cbb7ca7, no volume label. 5) compile and write a suitable boot sector. This is a smart script by Eric Auer that configures it with the appropiate parameters $ ./sys-freedos-linux/sys-freedos.pl --disk=FreeDOS.img DOS boot sector for FreeDOS.img will be created by: nasm -o /dev/stdout -dISFAT12 ./sys-freedos-linux/bootsecs/boot.asm Using FAT12. Partn offset 0, CHS *x64x32 Drive 0, (0x0, 0x29), SerNo CBB-7CA7, Strings ' ', 'FAT12 '. Boot sector successfully updated. 6) mount it in a directory $ mkdir bootimg $ sudo mount -v -o loop,uid=you,gid=you FreeDOS.img bootimg 7) copy into it KERNEL.SYS, COMMAND.COM and all other files 8) use it just the same way then the image made from a floppy, memdisk will recognize it. I used isolinux, here is how I created the iso: $ mkisofs -R -v -A FreeDOS big boot CD -V FreeDOS-V1.x \ -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat \ -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table \ -o /mnt/dados/Segurver/FreeDOS-V1.x.iso \ /mnt/dados/CDROM Alain -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
