Gunaydin Deniz ;-) Thanks for the compliments about FreeDOS. Of course it should not only make you feel like 15 years in the past but also like a more modern variant of DOS than the one you knew in MS DOS 6.
Usually, FreeDOS memory consumption is quite low. Some ideas: Only load DOSLFN when you really want to use long file names. Only load SHARE when you think you need it (for example when you want to run DOS apps from within Windows)... Only load DISPLAY when you really need a font with characters which are not in your VGA BIOS font. For me myself, being able to show the Euro currency sign on the DOS screen is not worth 10 or more kilobytes of RAM ;-). Always load HIMEM, because that gives you HMA and XMS, and with DOS=HIGH and with our default FreeCOM command.com XMS swapping feature, that already saves quite some memory. Upgrade from EMM386 to JEMM386 from www.japheth.de, but take some time to read the docs and to manually tune your JEMM386 config sys line. It can happen easily that the default config either does not give you much UMB (DOS=UMB / DOS=HIGH,UMB) space or tries to use UMB areas which are in use by sth else, like your mainboard or network chipset, and make DOS unstable. http://fd-doc.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?n=FdDocEn.FdInstall has some more useful hints, and you can even edit it yourself. > When calling "mem.exe /all", I get told, that FreeDOS is using HMA, > but that there is still 11Kbytes (11359 bytes) free within HMA. > Is it possible to load some drivers into this free area of HMA or > to use it in some way? That is interesting. Normally, the kernel will use 40 kB of HMA for kernel code and the rest for BUFFERS. Maybe you have a line BUFFERS=toomany so the kernel could not put them into HMA? Try fewer buffers then. For example, try BUFFERS=30. If not all of them fit into HMA, then the kernel might have to use low memory for more than needed, leaving actually more HMA space unused. > I realised that "LOADHIGH" and "DEVICEHIGH" of the original MS-DOS had > some extra parameter switches (/L and /S). With these one is able to > specify more directly to which UMB the programs shall be loaded. I think that such switches are indeed available for LOADHIGH but actually I never used them, even with MS DOS. It is equally efficient to just tune things by reordering the drivers, checking which driver should be loaded after which. Also for DEVICEHIGH. If you load a driver into the biggest block, then it will not use more memory than usual. You can also load drivers which use less memory later, when only smaller areas are left over. And yes, you can also load device drivers from the command line, that tool is called DEVLOAD. Devload lets you decide where to load a driver, but the choice is not as flexible as with LOADHIGH. > By setting "DOSDATA=UMB" in FDconfig.sys the "BUFFERS", "STACKS", > "FILES" etc. from FDconfig sys get loaded to UMB This is correct. If they are scattered around, there should be no problem. Actually only FILES and BUFFERS should be split: A small amount in low DOS memory and the rest in UMB and HMA. You cannot always work in UMB, so a bit stays in low memory. Do not forget to check mem /d or mem /c or similar output for further manual tuning :-). Let me know how far you got. Without UMB, 600kB free should be quite feasible, and with UMB, you can even get 620kB or more. To squeeze out even more memory, you could use some "Q" drivers, but they recently need some tricks to load in FreeDOS. The Q HIMEM is almost as big as the normal one, but there are tuned cdrom and shsucdx and udma drivers which are interesting, esp if you really need the last byte. For me, 600kB is enough :-). Eric PS: On modern PCs, more and more ROMs and MMIO spaces float around in areas which could be used for UMBs in the past, so you will get only small UMBs on that 2 GB dual core Athlon :-p. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier. Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
