Ulrich Hansen wrote: > I had time to work with freedos in virtualbox the last two days. I > experienced some odd overheating problems. The Macbook Pro I used was > getting hot at the bottom and shut down automatically.
> It seems that FreeDOS grabs all the CPU power it finds. The Activity > Monitor (Applications - Utilities) show CPU Usage of 100 or 102 %. > The solution I found: > For normal work at the DOS terminal (prompt only) the problem is > solved by having a line > LH FDAPM APMDOS > in AUTOEXEC.BAT. (Another program people recommend is DOSIDLE, but it > is unfree and doesn't seem to work better than FDAPM.) > With this trick CPU usage goes down from 100% to 4%. > But as soon as programs like edit, nc or nc clones (doszip) or other > foreground or background applications are started (ftpsrv, sockets > ftpd etc.) CPU usage goes up again to 100 %. The following observations regard real (not emulated) hardware, which is what I use. FDAPM is *very* effective, but softwares must be FDAPM-aware. DosZip is FDAPM-aware and will typically use only 2% of CPU time, provided it is configured for that. Go to the Setup, System Options menu and chech the "Use DOS Idle Int 2Fh" checkbox. Navigator, NDN, and Connect have similar settings, and give similar results. Several text editors are also FDAPM-aware and will use the CPU for just a few percent of the time, typically 1-3%, even if you are typing real fast, and they require no special configuration for that. Some of them are: Aurora, FTE, MinEd, PEdit, SetEdit, TDE, as well as WordPerfect 6. Among the viewers, List (4DOS), Show (Horst Schäffer), and S (Japheth) are FDAPM-aware and will also typically use 1-3% of CPU time. Because I regularly use several non-FDAPM-aware softwares, such as the DataPerfect and Paradox databases and SuperCalc spreadsheet, I began using the shareware Tame, which I registered for US$ 20. It works fine, and CPU usage drops to a few percent, almost like the FDAPM-aware softwares. Later I found about DPAKBD which fulfils the same purpose as Tame. The instructions say: "DPAKBD is a TSR that attempts to put errant DOS application that poll the keyboard incessantly to sleep thus enabling the CPU to service the rest of its process queue." It was recommended as being free, but the docs are silent on that point. Both Tame and DPAKBD succeed in transforming non-FDAPM-aware softwares into FDAPM-aware ones. However, they have their drawbacks. Tame has a *very* complicated configuration (options are highly technical) and, as far as I can tell, practically no user support, although we have to pay for it. DPAKBD is much easier to configure, but it does not have an unload command; I circumvent this by the "mark" and "release" utilities (suggested by Bret Johnson) which also work fine in most cases. It is important to unload DPAKBD otherwise other softwares may run substantially slower. FreeDOS has the IDLEHALT kernel option, but I have not been able to make it work. As no tool is provided to monitor it, I used the simple method of feeling CPU temperature with my finger :-( Japheth has the DosIdle tool, but I have not been able to make it work either. That's about all I know on the topic of reducing unnecessary CPU usage. I wrote it partly in the hope that it may be useful to others, but also because I'd like other group members to correct me if I'm wrong. In view of all the above, I'd like to post the two following items to the FreeDOS wish list. (1) Perhaps the developers could take a fresh look into this issue, and somehow improve the CPU idling tools, and (2) perhaps people currently developing new DOS software such as Mike Brutman could make it FDAPM-aware when appropriate. Regards from Brazil, Marcos -------------------------------------- Marcos Favero Florence de Barros Campinas, Brazil ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable. Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy2 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
