Hi Santiago, > What is the smartdrv version for FreeDOS? Is it installed by default?
There are several caches. For example lbacache and cdrcache are part of FreeDOS 1.0, but the SATA / IDE UDMA driver "UIDE" also has some cache built in. Note that you do not need a driver for SATA / IDE to use harddisks. That is done by the BIOS. However, access can be much faster with UIDE if you have a bad BIOS and in addition, UIDE helps you to access CD / DVD / BD drives connected to the same controller. Note that you also have to load SHSUCDX (improved clone of MSCDEX) to let DOS understand the ISO9660 filesystem in which CD / DVD / BD are usually formatted. To use lbacache, you simply load it at any time after your XMS driver (HIMEM, HIMEMX, JEMMEX, XMGR or similar). The cdrcache for CD / DVD and BD is a bit unusual: You load it and connect it to your CDROM driver (e.g. XCDROM, GCDROM, UIDE) and then you tell your MSCDEX or SHSUCDEX that your CDROM driver would be cdrcache. So it pretends to be a CDROM driver, while in fact it just forwards and caches access. Another potentially interesting tool is TICKLE, which is loaded after lbacache to do read-ahead. In particular, it makes floppy read faster because it makes the cache read whole tracks even when you only read one sector. So if you read more data later, it is already cached. What is missing in FreeDOS is the possibility to "pool and delay" write access, which should not make much difference with harddisks and modern SSDs for the amounts of data you typically use in DOS. However, when writing to USB sticks or SD cards or similar, DOS can be significantly slower than other operating systems. in particular if your BIOS (or, if not supported by BIOS, your DOS USB driver) is only running at USB 1.1 speed. The http://bretjohnson.us/ driver by Bret Johnson supports UHCI which is USB 1.1 and is free open source. Unfortunately, the faster USB 3.0 (wow :-)) driver by Georg Potthast at http://www.dosusb.net/ is not free at the moment because too many companies used the free version. The free demo version only works for a certain time after each boot, to be more exact after you load it - you can reload without reboot. Regards, Eric PS: UIDE, LBACACHE, cdrcache, SHSUCDX, JEMMEX, XMGR, XCDROM, GCDROM, TICKLE, HIMEMX and many other drivers are free and open source :-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Create and publish websites with WebMatrix Use the most popular FREE web apps or write code yourself; WebMatrix provides all the features you need to develop and publish your website. http://p.sf.net/sfu/ms-webmatrix-sf _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
