Hi all,
my excuses for the length of this mail. I hope at least
Norbert and Blair will read all of it :-). The other
readers of the EMM386 2.11 thread might want to join ;-)
For all the rest, the summary is: There is less poison in
the community than you think. HIMEM and EMM386 are better
than you think but improving them is a good thing. There
is a FreeCOM update available (newer than our ISO). The
list is quiet because Blair etc are processing 1.0 devel
things behind the scenes, but not behind the scenes to
keep the community from enjoying the development. QHIMEM
has some undocumented extra features. DOOM works with
HIMEM, too. The don't complain sentence in the EMM386
docs is years old and from Tom, not from Michael. Sorry
for the miscommunication about the FreeCOM / diskimage
issue, Norbert. Explicit and detailled bug reports are
better than blaming people for bugs in general.
Please stop reading here if you only want to get an
overview. Well, do not forget to browse the text below
a bit anyway, to find the new FreeCOM download URL ;-).
When reading the messages in developer mailing list, I'm wondering about
where FreeDOS is moving. The developers are only blaming each other
whole time. There's no normal discussion possible...
This is not true. You just read the mailing list at the one moment
when a flamewar about qhimem was going on.
Why always discuss things off-list? Has the rest of the dos
community no right to see what's going on in the development of the
software they are using?
Honestly, I think the rest of the dos community does not say
anything at all, not even off-list. For example nobody writes
mail about my cache, neither on-list nor off-list, probably
because the cache has been working well enough recently :-).
So it is not the case that we use the list only for flamewars
and discuss all improvements off-list :-). You should also
visit the IRC if you are interested in the latest distro news
and gossip ;-).
Even if Johnson told wrong facts in the field of programming, I must say
that Michael Devore is the wrong man to judge this. It's a fact that his
himem and emm386 clones are absolutely useless in a productive
environment. There are too many bugs concerning different types of
hardware and freedos very often crashes when using emm386. Using Jack R.
Ellis qhimem and Uwe Sieber's umbpci is the only way to use Freedos with
UMBs on nearly all kinds of harware by always using the same settings.
Very harsh words about FreeDOS HIMEM / EMM386. I think I deleted
MS HIMEM and MS EMM386 a year ago because the FreeDOS versions
were actually BETTER than the MS DOS 6.xx ones for me! They have
smaller memory footprint and work better with modern hardware...
On some hardware, UMBPCI has better performance and/or stability
than EMM386. But for example on my test PC, UMBs created by UMBPCI
are slow memory, and loading CPU-intensive stuff like a cache to
that area makes the whole thing slow. UMBPCI also depends on having
exact knowledge about your particular mainboard chipset, while
EMM386 should work on all 386 and newer systems. Problems with
EMM386 are usually caused by incompatible BIOSes. You should test
if MS DOS EMM386 works with those BIOSes. If yes, please report.
If no, you cannot blame EMM386 - you are then simply stuck in a
situation where no protected mode based UMB providers work, and
where you have to revert to the real mode driver UMBPCI (which
cannot provide EMS, but most DOS programs do not need EMS...).
Later I installed the MS versions again for testing purposes with
Windows, but again found that Win3.1 works better with FD HIMEM :).
Notice that 386 enh mode of Win3.1 and WfW3.11 only works with
MS EMM386, but that all Win 3.x versions come with MS EMM386 on
the Win 3.x install diskettes anyway. The background is that the
heavy tweaks of 386 mode to make DOS true multitasking include
replacing the whole emm386 on the fly with a built-in driver
of the Windows kernel, which requires a complex interface called
GEMMIS. Nothing else apart from Windows uses GEMMIS, and because
of this, FreeDOS EMM386 does not include GEMMIS.
[qhimem] is without any doubt the better and more reliable product
for everydays use even if there are some features missing.
Did you try the FreeDOS memory managers in their newest versions?
Yes there were problems with EMM386 about VDS / SCSI / SATA in the
past, but at least HIMEM has been working fine for me for a long time.
The only advantage of QHIMEM is that it uses even less DOS memory.
As Jack does not reveal his sources, it is hard to tell which
other advantages ought to exist. I hear that he has allow an IRQ
window after every move of a few (2? 4? 8?) kilobytes of XMS, to
improve realtime handling, but I doubt that this is actually
relevant unless you have a gbit ethernet card on a 486...?
The worst thing is that Michael doesn't care about bug reports from the
dos users that have problems running
