*BSD News Article 66606


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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!leonard.anu.edu.au!not-for-mail
From: gpg109@leonard.anu.edu.au (Paul Gortmaker)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Historic Opportunity facing Free Unix (was Re: The Lai/Baker paper, benchmarks, and the world of free UNIX)
Date: 24 Apr 1996 11:44:11 +1000
Organization: Australian National University
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[Newsgroups hacked down to FreeBSD and Linux]

"Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> writes:

>To be fair, we were talking about DOS emulation at the level provided by
>OS/2 or Win95.  DOSEmu, as capable as it is at running *certain* DOS
>applications, is NOT a general dos emulator that I can count on to run
>everything from my EISA setup utilities and SMC EZSTART floppy to "Sam
>and Max" off CDROM (just to pick 3 real-world examples from my very own
>wish list).

While it is true that DOSemu is not in the same league as that which you
can do in OS/2 and whatnot, allow me to be pedantic and point out that two
of your three examples above are not beyond the capabilities of DOSemu.
(I can't comment on "Sam and Max" because I haven't a clue what it is ;-)

First of all, if you tell DOSemu to allow access to your ethernet cards
i/o ports, you can run the SMC EZsetup stuff to change the EEPROM settings
on the card. I have done this in the past as a test. Of course if you run 
the diagnostic it will fail the interrupt test (unless you install the 
interrupt generator along with DOSemu), but I assume your only reason
for running it is to change the card settings. (Since you have to reboot
for the new settings to take effect, the point is moot anyway)

As for the EISA config util, I suspect that allowing access to the 
appropriate i/o ports will allow it to work as well. I have run the
DOS utils for management of the cache RAM on an EISA/VLB BusLogic SCSI
clone under DOSemu without problem once I let it access the card's EISA 
i/o ports (i.e > 0x3ff). Again, the point of running an EISA "cf" under
DOSemu is moot, since you have to reboot for the new settings to take 
effect. In fact most EISA "cf" utils will try to do a hard reboot after
you do a save+exit anyways, so I wouldn't advise running it under a
Win95 or OS/2 DOS session either.

To give you a better example of something that *doesn't* work under
DOSemu, we have a DOS program on floppy disk that calculates ion 
implantation profiles and it is copy-protected. If you try and run it 
under DOSemu, the protection scheme erroneously believes that it is an 
illegal copy and the program refuses to run. (I am only assuming that it
would work okay in a win95 or OS/2 DOS session as I haven't tried it.)

Out of curiousity, what level of emulation can FreeBSD users expect
from the recently obtained BSDI code that was announced? With respect to
functionality, will it be closer to DOSemu or a DOS session under OS/2 ?

Paul.