Hi, On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 4:28 PM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > > Hi, has any of you tested UltraDefrag for Windows? > > http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/en/index.html
Interesting. Thanks for the link, though I think you're being *highly* optimistic in thinking that anyone will even look at it, much less adapt it. It's GPLv2, written in C and Lua, available for Win32, Win64, IA64. However, it's not totally obvious from a quick look, but it most likely relies on a specific compiler (MSVC) and definitely uses a few DOS-unfriendly headers and datatypes. Though honestly the source archive isn't very big, so it's probably not too too too hard to adapt if you really know what you're doing (and I don't). You'd think DOS (direct hardware access) would be an ideal environment for defragging, and certainly DJGPP should be robust enough, in theory, but I guess some people prefer to do it in the background of Windows itself while running other stuff. Remember Win9x? Nobody liked having to sit there bored, walking on eggshells, while it got the job done. > It was one of the project of the month candidates. > UltraDefrag defrags FAT, NTFS, exFAT, including > registries and swap/pagefiles and MFT structures. Only the FAT part would be interesting to FreeDOS. Though there really isn't any active file system guru around here, AFAICT. And I don't think NTFS or exFAT are likely candidates for political / licensing reasons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_default_file_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_systems > Comes with a GUI and a command line version. May > be interesting for daring HX DOS users. Of course > playing with a defragger in the "wrong" OS is a > VERY risky thing. I'd bet it doesn't even run there. HX seems to have less support for newer APIs, and UltraDefrag implies NT/2000/XP on up only. > Another potential use could be > making a DOS port of UltraDefrag, of course :-) It would probably be easier to write one from scratch. But yeah, this one probably gives some good low-level info for the curious. > Normally, UltraDefrag is for WinNT/2000/XP and 7. > Chief developer Dmitri has DOS experience and he > speaks C, ASM, Perl, Lua, JS, Matlab, Atmel. The > other programmers also have some DOS experience. A lot of people have DOS experience because, frankly, they're old. But nowadays everything is a POSIX (or Windows). Nobody cares about anything else, even something as good as DJGPP. I was actually very surprised UltraDefrag didn't use ./configure && make like every other horrible piece of software out there. (Don't take that the wrong way, GNU stuff works well, but it's just a horrible kludge for non-POSIX OSes.) Anyways, C and Lua are all that are used here (according to the SourceForge summary page). But that's just languages themselves, not headers, APIs, libraries, etc. > Also promising: The handbook mentions "little" > binaries of less than 500kB and a no-install exe. Yes, it also has a portable version for removable jump drives, etc. > Less DOSish: All I/O uses a WinNT/XP fs driver, > only XP or newer drivers enable advanced defrag. > > http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/handbook/Introduction.html Of course, the OS is protected, so you can't just randomly read / write to the hard drive with impunity. That's bad stuff, man! So that alone is a major hurdle to porting it anywhere else. > PS: The homepages of the other developers apart > from Dmitri himself are surprisingly outdated :-p > > http://ultradefrag.sf.net/screenshots/cmd-cde.png :) That's the console version. There's also a GUI one. P.S. Who invented defrag? I want to say Norton (etc), but that's probably wrong (though MS did license it from them, right?). John Socha (of NC fame) basically invented the screensaver, Peter Norton basically invented undelete, so that's what I'm thinking of here. (Yeah, I know, others probably independently discovered it all too.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Virtualization & Cloud Management Using Capacity Planning Cloud computing makes use of virtualization - but cloud computing also focuses on allowing computing to be delivered as a service. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51521223/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
