Hi Bernd! Nice to hear about FreeDOS beta 9.5 :-). > * Completely rewritten readme files (so DO READ them!) Fine, where can I download them separately from the ISO? > * Improved installation menu navigation Hopefully less complex BAT files now... > * Configurable NLS settings (codepages, keyboard layouts) Kind of cool. Maybe somebody can write a binary version of the installation menu system for the next version? Every new beta 9.x release reaches new highs of sophisticated BAT fiddling and hits points where helper tools are needed to solve things in BAT at all. > * FreeDOS Kernel 2034, reduced memory usage (Bart Oldeman) This reminds me of the 386 question: How much bigger than the FAT16 kernel is the FAT32 kernel in RAM (low, umb, hma) and how much of this would be saved by optimizing for 386, experiences? How about speed gain? > * DOSFSCHK working version for FAT32 (Imre Leber, patch by Lucho) Typo... it is DOSFSCK 2.10 ported from Linux dosfstools, if anybody should ask. > * EDIT 0.8, fixing the 'expanding TABS' bug (Joe Cosentino) That one came as a surprise for me. Thanks Joe! > * HTMLhelp 1.03, including ZIP support for saving disk space Nifty feature, indeed. Bernd also suggested compressed CPI for DISPLAY / MODE, with GZIP: Question, is there already an established compressed-CPI file format or should we indeed use GZIP (or e.g. RLE / Huffmann Coding / simple "copy N bytes from offset M" style compression ... the latter is easy to decompress but slow for compression, altlhough that does not really hurt). > * MODE, new features & works better with DISPLAY (Eric Auer) Plus some relatively boring updates to CDRcache, LBAcache, FDAPM, about which I have some questions:
- I would love some feedback about whether the cache hit ratio got worse due to bigger element size (bigger element size: saves DOS RAM and CPU time), compared to 22oct2003 version (which was the last version with 4k el. size) especially for not-very-big caches. - I hope FDAPM ADV:REG mode now avoids the Novell slowdown which the APMDOS (ADV:MAX) mode caused. Remember that ADV.../APMDOS are the only modes which cause FDAPM to stay in RAM. Everything else simply happens at once. - Does YOUR CD-ROM driver report disk changes properly? ATAPICDD just reports "do not know" if disk was idle for a while and "no" otherwise (you now need verbose mode to see messages about this: ECHO V > CDRCACH$ enables that). Some features which I hope to get done before beta 9.6 (if there is interest, so feedback is welcome): MODE could read COMn config from hardware. MODE could allow int 14.05 DTR / RTS (other bits are probably pointless) control for COMn ports. MODE could allow fancy retry functionality but nobody missed it yet. FORMAT improved "... completed" and "prompt for label" did not make it into beta 9.5, so remind me later. FAT32 mirror/safeformat seems to have a bug which spoils unformat. FAT32 Win9x compatibility still is a mystery (parameters look okay but Win9x still uses wrong root dir sectors)... LBACACHE speed is an interesting project - cache miss events should limit search to 1/64 of the cache for each hash to implement that. Stay tuned :-). LBACACHE caching of oversized floppy disks should be done when I get back to get my test PC in shape again (pretty soon, I assume). Element size command line option will wait until I get benchmarks comparing 22oct2003 and current devel version. Read-ahead tuning can use testers, as usual. CDRCACHE read-ahead will happen when somebody tests the read-ahead which I assume to be possible with MSCDEX, I guess. Eric ------------------------------------------------------- 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
