Hi Rugxulo, Jerome, Jim et al,
> The full 1.2 release was from late 2016 / early 2017. > It hasn't changed. Good point, although 1.3 is still pending, so people might still want to update while they only have 1.2. > As far as I'm concerned, UIDE [sic] died in 2015. Another reason to switch to UHDD and UDVD2. > That makes no sense (to me). UHDD.SYS (from 2015) indeed had a > surprise update in early 2019 (dunno what changed, ask Jim), but > UDVD2.SYS is still dated 2015. > > * https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/cdrom/uide/ > > "It would probably be better" ... if XIDE/XHDD/XDVD2 (or whatever he > calls it nowadays) wasn't unjustly "closed source" for five years! You do know that the 2019 version *does* include full sources of UDVD2, UHDD, UIDE and XMGR, I hope. And I do *not* remember attempts by other programmers to update them which would have failed during the period when sources were unpublished, simply because low level drivers rarely get updates from new people. Replying to my list, you ask for more exact descriptions of the improvements in the currently-on-ibiblio 2019 UHDD and UDVD2: Better performance: UHDD 10% faster with read-ahead than UIDE. 386 compatibility: UHDD can run on 386, while UIDE follows old Microsoft advice which causes XMS move errors on older 386 CPU. Improved drive detection and LBA: UHDD supports DMA on SSD (as well as CF) which claim to be "ATA / ATAPI" while UIDE would have ignored them as potentially optical, expecting *only* ATA to be supported. UIDE supports only old LBA for the first 128 GB, while UHDD supports LBA48 and larger disks. Note that DOS itself has a 2 TB limit until somebody adds GPT partition code. Because UHDD (and UDVD2, in spite of being "old") recognize more drives as DMA/UDMA compatible, without false positives, they give much better performance in those cases compared to situations where UIDE fails to detect the DMA support. This can mean up to several *times* faster in EMM386 context, as a BIOS would rarely bother to call the VDMA API to support fast protected mode or VM86 disks on DMA and rather use PIO. > How is that even possible? Too many versions, too many > (alleged) bug fixes! Ridiculous! Being too annoyed to look at the new version will not make the new version worse. That is just your personal opinion. > These decisions (for FD 1.3) rely mostly on Jerome and Jim. Then I recommend UHDD and UDVD2 to Jerome and Jim, specifically. Regards, Eric PS: The drivers are deliberately freeware with sources without giving a specific license as the author is against fine print. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
