> >> support still is larger and slower than a 386 kernel on 386, so > >> you are just needlessly tempting 386+ owners to run extremely > >> retro-compatible, less optimized kernels ;-) Also, FAT32 is not > >> just a module which could easily be unloaded, it is the entire > >> set of MS DOS 7.10 compatibility things compared to MS DOS 5/6 > >> and using 8086 FAT32 kernels wastes a lot of memory on the 99.99% > >> of PC-XT which have less than 2 GB disk size, while using 8086 > >> kernels of any type on 386 or newer CPU is generally not cool.
> > Oh, I just meant for the 8086 kernel. > > And yes, without that being the intent prior to creating the support for > > FAT32, it would probably be a major pain to restructure it into an > > easily loaded/unloaded driver. > some facts, from my head, and 19 years old. your exact mileage may vary, > depending on compiler, 86 or 386, but the general outline should be > still correct. > FAT16, FAT12 and FAT32 code are the mostly the same; there is no separate > FAT32 driver. there is some code for FAT32 where FAT32 is really > different from FAT16/FAT12. > most of the size increase (~3,5 K) is because a CLUSTER is no longer > 16 bit, but 32 bit as required for FAT32, so the code can be used for > both FAT16 and FAT32. > some size increase (~1,5 K) comes from actual FAT32 specifics, that at > least theoretically could be unloaded. > a hugely better investment of programmer time would be to teach FreeCOm > to swap to disk (instead of swap to XMS), reusing the code for XMSSwap. > probably easier, and easier to debug (it's a mostly normal program) > for the benifit of 60+K instead of ~1K. > still, my personal opinion remains: > if a virtual PC allows 8086 CPUs, it should give them 256 KB memory > and at most 20 MB disk space and at most 8 MHz performance. > 8086 PC's are museum pieces, and should be running MSDOS 2.01 or > whatever they happen to have installed. > Tom [Ehlert] I took a computer course at now-defunct Kentucky Polytechnic Institute (KPI) in 1990. They used 8086 PCs with 30 MB hard drives and MS-DOS 3.31; 640 KB, or was it 1 MB, RAM. So why should a virtual PC be limited to 256 KB memory and 20 MB disk space, if indeed an 8086 or 8088 PC is really worth emulating? First PC I had was 386 SX CPU with 40 MB MFM hard drive; OS was MS-DOS 4.01. Tom _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
