Hi Louis,
> Do you mean something like the SHSU* Image/ISO to RAMDrive utils [0][1][2] > when you said, " If we had a driver that could directly use CD/DVD media > like a hard drive and cache changes to RAM, then things could be different > and possibly even better"? The problem is the CACHE CHANGES TO RAM part in the above. The drivers (shsufdrv, shsucdx) only allow read-only access to CD / DVD as actual drives or as ISO disk images stored on another local drive. Examples for what Linux would use for CD/DVD boots with RAM writes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OverlayFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnionFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufs This can be combined with compressed read-only systems such as SquashFS or CramFS. As DOS barely supports any overlay stuff, another question would be which FreeDOS packages work directly from read-only media. My guess is: MOST will! That means that the RAMDISK and RAM requirements for a FreeDOS live CD can be a lot smaller, because most packages can be used from their pre- installed instance which can be part of a normal CD / DVD. Only a few would have to be unpacked to a ramdisk when booting in live CD mode before they can be used. Even that could be tweaked, for example by asking the user which 1 of the 3 largest packages among those which need to be on writeable disk should be installed into the ramdisk. It would be interesting to see some stats about how much disk space FreeDOS 1.3 RC1 needs worst case on harddisk (possibly with 32kB per cluster, too) and how much of that needs to be on writeable media when considering a live CD. I hope the experts can extract this from their package list and database. Thanks :-) Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
