On Fri, Mar 20, 2026 at 1:49 PM Sijmen J. Mulder via Freedos-user <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi all, > > Thought I'd share my experience trying T2603: > > First in qemu-system-i386 running on a Raspberry Pi 400 (so, software > emulation): > > - Whole experience was sluggish, right from the start. Every screen of > the installer would visibly build up top-to-bottom. To be expected > perhaps, considering the software emulation?
This is definitely because of software emulation. The Raspberry Pi is a completely different CPU architecture, so the virtual machine (QEMU) is emulating every CPU call, that's all being done through software. If you had run QEMU on an Intel CPU, you could have used -enable-kvm on the command line to use the Kernel Virtual Machine mode, but this doesn't exist on a Raspberry Pi. Another reason it's slow is because I/O on a microSD card is not fast. For example, my Raspberry Pi has a SanDisk Ultra 64GB microSDXC UHS-I U1A1 card. The U1 is designed to support 1080p video recording (such as you might use in a GoPro camera) at minimum serial write speeds of 10MB/s. (By comparison, a V60 is aimed at cameras that do 4K video and has a minimum sequential write speed of 60MB/s.) > - First installation failed while copying FDMINES with an unclear > error. What was the error message? Note that since you're running QEMU, you could use '-display curses' and QEMU will run in text mode. That will make it easier to copy error messages from that terminal window, so you can paste them in an email. > - Recreated the virtual disk, manually created and formatted the > partition first, and then it went through without problems. I wonder, did you make the second virtual disk larger than the first? For example, since you mentioned FDMINES, that means you did a Full installation. If you made the disk image too small the first time, this will obviously fail because the virtual disk will fill up. If you made the second disk image large enough, that would have worked fine. When I made a very small (10MB) disk image and tries to do a full install, it happened to fail on HTMLHELP with the message: :: Unable to install the 'base\htmlhelp' package. :: A reboot may help. ..and when I exit to DOS, I can see the target drive (the disk image I'm installing to) has 98,304 bytes free (that is, just 96 kB). > - FDIMPLES was unusably slow. > - Otherwise, worked great! Yes, as expected, the slowness is because of CPU emulation via software. > > Then, on a Dell Inspiron 510m laptop: > > - Installation went super smooth > - FDIMPLES still very slow, arrowing from one option to the next would > take a second or too. But not unusuable, and in the end I got my > packages installed. [..] I'm not sure why keyboard input is causing a delay on real hardware -- unless maybe it's reading from the CD-ROM drive and the CD drive is slow? Do you hear the CD-ROM drive seeking when you move between options in FDIMPLES? _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
