>> The 8086 kernel can be compiled with FAT32.
The question is whether the floppy installer should use an 8086 FAT32 kernel. Pro: It works with FAT32 partitions which people may create even for 250 MB drives because they believe smaller clusters would always be great. And almost everybody has harddisks larger than 2 GB now, so if they are foolish enough to use the floppy installer, or simply lacking CD and afraid to use the USB installer, they WILL run into problems with FAT16 kernels. But then, it would be a lot better to use an 386 FAT32 kernel even for the floppy installer! Contra: The 8086 FAT32 kernel is even worse than the 8086 FAT16 kernel on real 8086 if you use FreeCOM with XMS SWAP because the 8086 has no XMS to XMS SWAP! I think the floppy distro should be tailored for 386 PC :-) Which means it should have a 386 FAT32 kernel. You already mention the functionality on the floppy distro to INSTALL the 386 kernel on 386, but it does not USE the same kernel. Which is a big problem, because the user will still be RUNNING the 8086 kernel from the floppy while they FDISK and FORMAT while preparing to install something on harddisk. You can always make an alternate 8086 boot floppy as add-on with 8086 FAT16 (!) kernel and FreeCOM with DISK SWAP, for the few real 8086 hardware people. I think it is nice that the distro tries to dynamically adapt what gets installed, but having separate boot floppies for different hardware just works better. Even Ubuntu has that server installer option with different hardware requirements. Of course you can in PRINCIPLE use a special boot menu on the floppy which selects either 386 or 8086 kernel at boot, but there is no need to make things that complicated. The few XT users will be experienced enough to manually decide to use that special 8086 boot floppy which I suggest to exist :-) Good night! Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
