Hi! > By the way which features are missing in FreeDOS
> a) for 100 % MS-DOS compatibility Missing features in the stable kernel are: - country sys / nlsfunc support: present in unstable branch, would be nice if that could be ported to stable but WITHOUT breaking the compiled-in support for common countries there - possibly some int 2f.12nn functions?? I think many of them are already implemented, but int 2f in general has lots of odd functions and somebody would have to read RBIL and our source code to check which of them are not yet implemented. - config sys menu: only syntactic incompatibility, as with some other "incompatible" apps (I assume you only ask about kernel, but for we have no app with the look and feel of MSAV... ;-)) I think Arkady had plans about that but some developers were concerned about related changes in user interface...? - long file names: not part of classical MS DOS 5/6, but part of bundled-with-Windows-9x MS DOS 7, available via DOSLFN :-) - instances, critical sections and full "reentrancy as long as you swap the SDA contents": only used by Windows 3.x and by Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (for 386Enh "multitasking" mode)? See below! - int 21.4b05 set execution state: unknown what this does, what needs this and how it can be implemented...?? - support for file sizes between 2 and 4 GB: depends on having good documentation about how seek / read / write behaves here, is controlled (in part?) by setting a flag when opening files. Only makes sense on FAT32 and only if you know any app which would do anything useful with such big files... - support for file sizes above 4 GB: this is not supported in MS DOS but we could go compatible to a hack used in EDR DOS (normal directory entries only have 32 bit file size fields) - open files in SYNC and NOCRIT mode: this would trigger writing all changes to disk (bypassing BUFFERS but not external cache?) at once for SYNC, and would bypass critical error handler calls for NOCRIT (would just return error status instead). I wonder whether any known app uses this. SHARE might be non-perfect, too. - support for DBCS (wide chars) and Japanese / Chinese / Korean language: Only available in far east versions of MS DOS either, provides interfaces for communicating with wide char screen and keyboard drivers which were separately available?? - several int 21.5dnn functions: get a list of all open files and commit or close files by name / by owner PSP segment / by PC name (the latter is "in the network" but has defaults for offline case) Sort of useful but I wonder which apps actually use this :-). > b) for 3.11 compatibility Windows for Workgroups has a pretty useless "standard mode", so what you are looking for is not only WfW 3.11 compatibility but rather general Windows 386Enh mode compatibility. This requires Windows to be able to freeze and restore the kernel state to be able to run multiple instances of the kernel or make the kernel "reentrant". Note that Windows will try to do disk access without kernel help by default, which you should disable if you have LBA or FAT32 ;-). You also have to trick Windows into seeing at most 256 MB (with tweaks 1 GB) RAM, otherwise the internal memory mgmt of Windows 3 will overflow. Oh and segments larger than 16 MB have issues too, so you may have to add workarounds to HIMEM and other apps...? In any case: The unstable kernel branch has an experimental patch (available as the winkernel binary on FreeDOS 1.0) which attempts to give Windows all critical sections, instance data and swappable (SDA) kernel stuff it needs to run in FreeDOS. Give it a try ;-). As far as I remember, this involved heavy changes to fnode handling as f_nodes are not known to MS DOS and not swapped by Windows. Any attempt to port this to the stable kernel would need very careful review of the involved patches... > c) for 95/98/ME compatibility? Good question. Does anybody here know? Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
