Direct hardware access is practically speaking the fastest way to go, but it is not the most maintainable approach. The problem with using say WordPerfect or MS Word or Visicalc even, hardware is changing. The printers of the MS-DOS era have largely been replaced by networked printers and USB printers. How can one hope to directly support the new hardware in DOS when companies tightly control access to their hardware blue prints? Yes you can hack hardware to figure out how it works or study it somehow, but studying integrated circuits can be expensive and difficult. The return on investment, questionable.
A 32/64 bit version of DOS isn't something that is well defined yet. As such, abstracting hardware details away might be possible. Imagine, a TSR for modern printers that abstracts the details away which WordPerfect, MS Word, Visicalc can send print jobs to using a well defined interface. Would this TSR be comparably fast to printer drivers for every modern printer written in assembly language? No. The point is, speed is not always the most important consideration even in a DOS environment. An input bound program is only as fast as the user at the keyboard. Dos means disk operating system which comes from QDOS which meant, quick and dirty operating system. A 32/64 bit version of Freedos is a project aiming to: access more memory, use larger hard disks, create larger files, use post DOS era hardware, and perhaps even use multiple cores. If there is a way to use say Windows or Linux print drivers in Freedos, why reinvent the wheel? Freedos does not protect the hardware and hardware is typically not abstracted away. Does this mean that all freedos drivers have to access the hardware directly? Could one make a modern sound card look like say a Sound Blaster 64 card via a driver that translates for the different hardware? If hardware drivers are embedded in DOS programs, does one have to hack those programs when new hardware comes out? Does Freedos make any sense on a multi core system with a terabyte or larger hard disk and gigabytes of ram? Many folks want to: word process, organize and play audio files, look at pictures, etcetera in Freedos. Others want to do real time work where direct hardware access and writing the code to control critical hardware in assembly language is mandatory. Graphical user interfaces are not a very DOS thing, but maximum performance is not always the overriding consideration. Maybe it is time to limit the scope of Freedos, that seems to be what people are doing already. I'm hearing, don't make Freedos a modern operating system. I'm hearing, no hardware protection even in Freedos 32 even if this is optional. One thing I dislike about DOS environments, typically if the program doesn't work because the hardware is not what it expected, there is nothing you can do. Unless you can recompile or patch the binary for the new hardware, you are toast. This was one of the major reasons for UNIX. Modern OS'es separate drivers from application programs instead of throwing them in the pot together. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ uberSVN's rich system and user administration capabilities and model configuration take the hassle out of deploying and managing Subversion and the tools developers use with it. Learn more about uberSVN and get a free download at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/wandisco-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
