Hi,
On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 7:36 PM, Michael Robinson
<plu...@robinson-west.com> wrote:
> There has been quite a bit of talk about AST hardware needing special
> drivers even under DOS. Well, if the company won't put the drivers in
> the public domain and there aren't very many AST computers in the world,
> the logical thing to do is recycle the ones that are left and replace
> them. Am I missing something? Are AST computers superior to normal PC
> compatibles?
It's probably fair use to backup copies of drivers if the company goes
offline. Redistributing might not be allowed, though honestly if it's
available nowhere else (and not charged for), I don't see the harm.
Otherwise, yeah, I don't see any better answer than dropping them, but
that's a horribly sad and useless "solution".
> In general, can free dos drivers be developed for hardware that is
> otherwise unusable?
Dunno, but there aren't many DOS driver developers anymore (and I'm
not thus skilled). So sure, anything's possible, but who will do it?
> For example, the sound blaster 16 pci card doesn't
> work apparently without expanded memory in dos and the driver has
> to be in a Windows 98 tree. Rather weird if you ask me.
Lots of legacy stuff did weird things, esp. geared towards Windows as
"MS" DOS was the (one-time) king.
> More to the point, you can't play Ultima 7 even under MS-DOS 6.20
> because the game is not compatible with protected mode environments.
Don't load EMM386 then? Wouldn't that work?
> Oops! There is
> Exult, but I find that it is somewhat unstable on top of 98SE. I
> haven't used it in a current Fedora system.
Dunno, if DOSBox doesn't work, try VirtualBox. I'd bet it works there
(at least with latest VT-X) as FASM's Kelvar demo ("big unreal mode"
or whatever) works (VirtualBox 4.1.4).
> Free operating systems whether we are discussing Freedos, Minix, or
> Linux have problems with certain hardware. In the Linux world
> unfortunately, drivers for modern graphics cards that work are hard to
> come by. In a Freedos environment, modern graphics card came after DOS
> lost most of it's popularity. On modern systems, one can use an
> emulated dos environment to create the appearance of a legacy PC, but
> what if you don't want to emulate? What if you are after real time
> computing and need to use the full capability of a modern graphics card?
> I can't think of a good example, but I'm sure one exists.
There are several real-time OSes, but I'm not familiar with any of
them. I assume someone would use something like VxWorks for that.
> Maybe Freedos isn't the best get the maximum out of a modern computer in
> real time OS. Dos was originally developed before the modern computers
> of today existed. Minix may be a better choice. I'm sure there are
> other real time OS'es available beyond Minix and Freedos.
I don't know if either is strictly "real-time". Anyways, Minix 2 was
nice (lean and useful), and 3 has undergone massive improvements and
changes but still isn't fully stable. I don't know where they're
headed and honestly haven't tried it lately.
> A few questions and points to take away:
>
> 1) Why should the open source community support rare hardware?
They don't, they just tell you to buy more, esp. regarding RAM, HDs,
gfx cards, network cards, etc.
> 2) Can the open source community support rare or even cutting edge
> hardware?
They can do whatever they wants, but usually it's pretty chaotic.
Usually it's only chasing trends, not stabilizing support.
> 3) What is it about DOS environments that draws people to them
> instead of Linux, Minix, etcetera environments?
Experience? Old hardware? Fun? Tons of legacy apps that were never ported?
> There is talk of not letting copyrighted software that the producers
> don't care about get lost. I think supporting software that is
> unpopular or not well documented inside and out in the public domain is
> a mistake.
Such as what? Obviously tons of people support Windows, even though it
radically changes every five years. And it's only partially
documented. Are you saying it's a waste of time to code for Windows?
(I would honestly "half" agree, but that's not saying much.) Though
I'm not sure I'm exactly pro-POSIX either.
Face it, most people treat computers as throw-away, even software.
It's only hardcore nerds that want to hoard it all forever and ever,
esp. because it "just works fine" for them. Silly nerds. ;-)
> Freedos exists because DOS is well defined in the public
> domain and there are talented people who took that information
> implementing what we have today. Think about where the open
> source community focuses resources and why.
It only exists because, at the time, it was very popular and had lots
of software and also computers were still weak. Nowadays almost nobody
cares, sadly, despite all the massively hard work that went into it.
They have "newer" toys, so they're willing to throw away the old ones.
> One of the weaknesses of a real time OS is that it probably won't
> protect against bad programming in the interest of speed. Another
> issue, spaghetti code is more likely which is harder to maintain than
> object oriented code. Whether a true real time environment is necessary
> for a particular task has to be weighed against the disadvantages.
You can have some runtime checking and OOP in a minimal language and
OS, e.g. Oberon.
> Computers are so fast now that an OS which allows one to write
> maintainable code at the expense of some speed loss probably makes more
> sense than an OS which will run a program as fast as possible at the
> expense of the code being harder to maintain. Harder to maintain code
> is more likely to have serious bugs which is counterproductive when time
> performance is critical. There is probably a sweet spot between real
> time and general purpose that is appropriate for most applications.
This is why (most) people don't write purely in x86 asm and instead
use HLLs. It's "fast enough".
> As a thought experiment, how do you design a real time kernel so that
> you can say this operation has to complete in x time and it will?
I don't know. I'm not sure you can, at least not easily, not on
commodity x86 hardware. Cpu speed throttling (e.g. Pentium 4 when gets
hot) or overclocking (?? Turbo Boost, ACPI P0) might hamper that, not
to mention the SMP aspect (RDTSC may or may not go wonky), etc. etc.
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