Hi Eric, Some good questions in there.
I know you already know most of the things I cover in this message. But, I felt I should simplify a lot of the details and go over it for those who may not know some of this stuff. > On Dec 9, 2019, at 7:42 PM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > > > Hi! > > Thanks for the announcements... I have some questions :-) > > If legacy avoids syslinux / memdisk, which computers can > boot from CD but can not use syslinux / memdisk? And which > computers can use syslinux / memdisk but can not boot from > el torito (did you mean boot floppy image?) bootable CD? All computers with BIOS support should be able to boot from a CD-ROM drive “SHOULD” be able to boot a disc that follows the original El Torito boot specification. The El Torito spec is ancient and most bootable discs have moved on to the more common practice of loading a binary image from the media and running it. The binary image method of booting has also been around a really long time. There is only a narrow window of real hardware that can boot the original El Torito spec and not a binary image. I speculate that since El Torito is not common for modern boot discs, it’s BIOS level support is rarely tested. So, it more or less comes down to this. On real hardware, the older the machine is the more likely support for the original El Torito specification is to function properly. On newer hardware and Virtual Machine platforms, it becomes increasingly more likely that it does not and the binary image will be required. > > Would it be useful to ship the ISOs with VMDK files, too? Why? Virtual Machines have direct support for using ISOs without the need for a VMDK file. Actually, I been thinking we should just drop the VMDK file from the USB images. It is far easier to just install from the CD ISO than use one of the VMDKs. Using one to the VMDKs, requires shuffling stuff around and other stuff. > Can the boot floppy either mount the ISO from a file or use > actual CD/DVD/... drives and if yes, which requirements have > to be met for which of the two options? If I understand you correctly…. No. The floppy will not emulate a CD-ROM drive and mount an ISO as a disc. Yes. At present, the floppy loads UDVD2 to be able to access any present CD/DVD drives. The floppy is limited to supporting drives that UDVD2 supports in it’s default configuration. The installer program (FDI) is identical across all media. There are some differences in the boot process in fdauto and fdconfig. And a couple options may be passed to the installer from the boot process. But, the FDI is the same. For a batch based program, FDI is fairly flexible and extensible. It can install FreeDOS from a variety of sources. Basically... When FDI reaches the “gathering some information” screen, it is locating the installation packages. These packages can be on the same drive as the installer or elsewhere. The first valid set of install packages it finds are used. Those packages could be on a CD-ROM, USB drive or local hard drive. > > Do the lite and full USB versions also have the "live" (no > install needed) functionality? Not at present. > Would a lite CD be useful or > is everybody happy with lite USB? To my knowledge, there has been no demand for a lite CD version. Don’t know if anyone is happy with the new lite USB. In 1.2, the lite USB included both the BASE and FULL install package sets. However, It did not include all of the EXTRA and uninstalled packages that came on the big USB and CD media. This is different in 1.3. With the dramatic increase in packages that are automatically installed during a FULL install, the space requirements for the FULL package set have greatly increased. This made including them on a lite USB version impractical. So starting with 1.3, only a the BASE install and related packages are provided on the lite USB. To preform a FULL install or have ready access to an EXTRA package, the full USB or CD media will be required. > Which boot style do the > USB downloads use, direct USB drive boot or rather again > something with memdisk and a Linux style loader for that? Neither. The USB images rely strictly on the BIOS to be able to use a attached USB drive to emulate an internal drive and boot them as a hard disk. > Regarding the size requirements, which filesystem type and > cluster sizes do those assume? I know it could be a bit > tricky to extrapolate those, but it would still be good > to know at least the FAT16 "bad" case (32k clusters) and > the FAT32 default case (4k clusters, drives 1/2 to 8 GB). > As FAT12 is only used for drives up to 16 MB (max cluster > size 4k) there is no need to consider that at the moment. Basically, they are just the defaults for the appropriate sizes. The release build process looks up settings defined in FDI to determine the capacity of the USB images. Currently, 32MB for lite and 1024MB for FULL. The build process then creates disk images and uses FreeDOS to partition and format them using default settings. > Thanks to everybody who helped with 1.3rc2 indeed :-) :-) > > Eric > > PS: Interesting that MS has given some exFAT patents to OIN > and re-licensed the exFAT specs after 10+ years this year! >> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/exfat-specification _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
