On 10/25/07, Pat Villani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Interestingly enough, a lot of responses seem not care about new > development. Some even go as far as saying that whatever we have for > dos extenders, memory managers, etc., is good enough. Does this mean > that there is no new development expected from the majority of FreeDOS > developers?
Indeed, the majority of past FreeDOS developers aren't very active. I might (help) try to get a new kernel release out of the door when I have time but that's all I can promise. But that's just collecting bug fixes and basic maintenance work. We've always had different goals for FreeDOS: 1. older PCs, too slow for Windows '95 2. embedded 3. emulators 4. recovery, exploiting the fact that DOS programs have unlimited hardware access, DOS being a 'glorified boot loader' 5. a desktop operating system for modern PCs Tom is interested in 4, I am interested in 3 (DOSEMU, so for me compatibility with existing DOS programs is the most important), and we've seen the occasional embedded developers (I think Lucho is) and charities coming by as time passed. 5. has seen a vocal *user* minority, but no real contributions to the FreeDOS kernel. So if you don't see much developer interest in multi-core, then that's why. Not too mention the huge task to write a modern operating system that supports modern hardware: the Linux kernel source is presently 160 times bigger than the FreeDOS kernel source! Of course, do not forget Udo Kuhnt, who is in category 5, but instead decided to work on enhanced DR-DOS, but this being a one-man's project with a restricted license to boot it is not moving very fast either of course, notwithstanding the impressive progress considering what it is. One might think, why not combine unrestricted hardware access with something more modern, not restricted to the 16bit 8086 segmentation -- see http://freedos-32.sourceforge.net/ but it's a different aim, 100% compatibility not being the primary goal. And I do think DOS is quite restricted in what you can do with it: the fact that, no matter how obscure some undocumented detail is, there will be at least one DOS program that exploits it. That means that for any extension you cannot just adjust FreeDOS internally as one can freely do in Linux! But split up fields in structures so the high and low parts are far apart. Not to mention SMP: do CPU specific parts of the LoL or SDA always refer to CPU 0? It becomes uglier and uglier... At which point it just makes more sense to me to let a bigger OS multitask/process a more or less unchanged DOS, instead of letting DOS do the multitasking. Bart ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
