Hi Michael,
> Freedos in general is an IDE only system,
> but why not support SATA I/II/III?
That is what your BIOS already does for you :-)
> No MS-DOS, DR-DOS, etcetera don't support SATA
They all support SATA, too, because they use BIOS.
> What are the implications of adding SATA
> support to the kernel or through a TSR?
You can load UHDD to get optimized SATA UDMA speed:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.2/repos/pkg-html/group-util.html
> The obvious workaround is to get a SATA to
> PATA converter. That's kinda kludgy though.
Why would you do that? If your mainboard has
IDE / PATA, use IDE / PATA disks and if it
has SATA, use SATA disks. You can also use
converters between SATA and PATA to plug old
PATA disks to new SATA mainboards and vice
versa, but that does not seem very useful and
many not-so-old mainboards even have both types
of connectors :-)
Note that the SATA UDMA speed might only work if
you set your BIOS to SATA mode, not to AHCI mode.
FreeDOS will support disks up to 128 GB or 2 TB,
depending on whether your BIOS supports LBA48.
You have to format and partition the filesystems
to use 512 byte sector size. Using 4096 byte for
the partitioning or using GPT partitioning for
disks larger than 2 TB will lead to DOS ignoring
your partitions.
Of course it would be interesting to eventually
add support for GPT partitioning and full use of
LBA48, then you can use 2 TB per FAT32 partition
on almost infinite harddisk or SSD sizes ;-)
It would be harder to support 4 kB sectors, or
partition sizes larger than 4294967296 sectors.
Note that FAT32 only supports files larger than
4 GB using non-standard extensions on some OS,
see FAT+ on wikipedia, for max 256 GB per file.
Regards, Eric
PS: Note that exFAT has nothing to do with FAT!
___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
