At 02:36 PM 3/10/2004 -0300, Alain wrote: >Ho Michael, > >first of all, many thanks :) > >>EMM386 will only allocate VCPI memory from the EMS memory pool. Making it >>automatically use the XMS memory pool would require backdoor interaction >> with HIMEM[64] and generally make things quite a bit more complex. >>Of course, a DOS extender/extended program can still use XMS in addition to >> VCPI and many of them do. > >I can see aproblem here (or I can have missunderstood): IMHO what will be used a lot >is UMB+VCPI without EMS. The reason for this configuration is whe 1) UMBPCI does not >work (new hw), 2) no need for EMS (few programs use it) 3) free as much as possible >Low-Memory for comon programs (EMS takes 64k of UMB)(very often needed). Will this >configuration work??
Depends. Some extenders have absolutely no problem allocating from XMS if no VCPI memory available. Unfortunately, DOS/4GW, now crowned That Annoying Extender Which Grossly Misbehaves, doesn't like current EMM386 NOEMS. I'm still trying to sort that out and am not sure whether it's due to no memory in VCPI pool, missing EMS page frame, or something else. NOEMS is pretty badly broken in the EMM386 version out there anyway, but I've fixed it up some for next patch release. Now NOEMS allocates up to 192K for UMB's and VCPI internal table use, which typically leaves at least 32K for a VCPI pool, more if you have fewer UMB's. The DOS/4GW problem does need to be addressed since it's most popular extender out there and a lot of legacy applications use it. I'm thinking maybe if the residual EMS left-over after UMB allocation is too low, I'll have EMM386 by default grab a hunk of XMS memory at startup to keep for as VCPI pool. Biggest hurdle is that this behavior is not the most friendly use of memory. And if I do that, I'll need to slightly modify HIMEM again to increase default handles, since it's already pretty low without EMM386 grabbing memory. What would you think about an EMM386 that decided to steal some of your XMS memory at startup, just in case a VCPI-using program wanted it later on? I mean, the memory might never be needed if nothing ran which used VCPI, it would just be gone. Proper settings would need some type of command line parameter control, but we really need is a basic default for the general Joe and Joyce User who simply sticks NOEMS in there and still expects their DOS-extended to run with a DOS extender or related protected mode application than can't fallback to XMS allocation. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
