Hi Jim, > unfortunately, freedos doesn't support anything over 8GB
Please explain. It supports up to 2 TB with LBA. Maybe you mean the size of individual files, limited to 2 or 4 GB. > on x64 and maybe i386, even if support for BIOS should go away and > only UEFI and x64 remains You can use DOS on x64 systems because they are i386 compatible. You can also use DOS on multi core or even multi CPU systems because they have at least one CPU with at least one core. Note that DOS will "only" use the first 4 Gigabytes of your RAM, as no DPMI which supports more is available. And only 1 CPU core. You can always use free open source compilers to compile your commercial products. So DJGPP could actually be quite okay for you. You could run some compiler on 64bit Linux or Windows for making 32bit DOS apps, if you want to avoid running compilers in DOS windows inside your Linux or Windows, or on plain DOS. Maybe DJGPP, MinGW, OpenWatcom... But then, the performance is quite okay if you compile with a normal DOS compiler version, in DOS or Windows or a DOSEMU box in Linux, in particular when a ramdisk is available for the heavier parts of compiling... > - I would like to see a windows-nt/7/xp-ized kind of long filenames > for the filesystem. it can fall back to 8.3, it works with floppies,I > think it's the numeric tails system with NT, but I could be wrong. > windows 9x/me not quite compatible with this I think (except for cd Actually Windows versions which do use long file names support them on all FAT and NTFS disks, including floppy. When you use such disks with DOS without loading long file name drivers, the long names are not visible and you see 8.3 with numeric tails. When drivers are active, or in Windows or Linux, the opposite happens: The 8.3 names are hidden and the long names are shown. Note that for CD / DVD / BD you have other systems for long file names, so it can happen that your operating system has drivers for harddisk / floppy / flash but not optical, or vice versa. > - support exFAT/fat64 OR support FAT32 to 32GiB (due to age-old > microsoft bugs/limitations which still exist, the filesystem can > handle 8TB). - support for 4k or larger sectors... Note that exFAT is not similar to FAT at all apart from having FAT in the name and that you cannot get a free license IMHO. The EDR DOS hack for FAT32 (and some similar hacks, mostly by DVD diskimage processing software, for Windows) to make it support file sizes above 4 GB would be nice to have, yes, although it has some limitations - you have to look at the FAT chain to know the true size as the directory entry only has the lower 32 bit of the size. Support for larger sectors is nice in the long run, but more or less all disks available at the moment can still be used with 512 byte sectors even when they also support 4k sectors. Note that larger sector disks might require UEFI booting, as I have doubts that MBR BIOS support is smooth for those. The BIOS might just prefer to use the 512 byte sector view there. Talking about which, support for UEFI GPT partitions would be both very nice and reasonably easy to add, as data structures are not overly complicated. We can skip all non-FAT partitions and similar advanced objects. I do have doubts that 2 TB of DOS data can be downloaded ;-) Note that a POS terminal software and DOS easily fit 1 GB CF. Regards, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis & visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
