On at 2026-04-30 12:05:54 -0400, Jerome Shidel via Freedos-devel wrote: > SHSUFDRV and SHSURDRV are both part of the same package SHSUFDRV. > > SHSURDRV.EXE is used on most systems and virtual machines by > the primary FreeDOS installer to create temporary storage space > when no hard disk has yet been partitioned and formatted. It is > preferred over using SRDISK because it can be told to keep a > minimum amount of XMS memory available for programs on systems > whose available memory is not known. If SHSURDRV.EXE fails to > allocate a RAM drive (Or always under QEMU), it will fall back > and attempt to allocate a RAM drive using SRDISK. > > While the FreeDOS installer “can” run without any RAM drive or > temporary storage, removing the SHSUFDRV package will greatly > curtail some of its functionality which occurs prior to > partitioning and formatting the internal disk on many systems. > Only relying on SRDISK (when supported) can also result in > having no free XMS when booting from the LiveCD, which could > prevent the user from trying various games and programs.
What exact behaviour do you want to have? I already forked SRDISK a while back, see website [1] and repo [2]. It does have an option called /FREEMEM: already, though it is possible this does not work the way you desire. From a quick look at SHSURDRV, it appears that it works like so: 1. Allocate /R memory 1.a. if successful store handle in XMSrsrv 1.b. if failed do ignore and continue 2. Allocate actual memory to use for all drives 2.a. if all drives failed, abort installation 3. Free /R memory (handle in XMSrsrv) if it was allocated 4. Terminate process (TSR using 21.4C or 21.31 if installed) Do you use /T as well? What it does for that seems to be only slightly more complicated, I could create a description of that too. I didn't look into SRDISK's /FREEMEM as much yet. However, I do believe it can be made to work in a similar way to SHSURDRV's /R. Regards, ecm [1]: https://pushbx.org/ecm/web/#projects-srdisk [2]: https://hg.pushbx.org/ecm/srdisk/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
