> On Mar 8, 2019, at 9:40 AM, Eric Auer <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hi Louis, > >> Do you mean something like the SHSU* Image/ISO to RAMDrive utils [0][1][2] >> when you said, " If we had a driver that could directly use CD/DVD media >> like a hard drive and cache changes to RAM, then things could be different >> and possibly even better"? > > The problem is the CACHE CHANGES TO RAM part in the above. The drivers > (shsufdrv, shsucdx) only allow read-only access to CD / DVD as actual > drives or as ISO disk images stored on another local drive.
Yep :-) > > Examples for what Linux would use for CD/DVD boots with RAM writes: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OverlayFS > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnionFS > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufs > > This can be combined with compressed read-only systems such as SquashFS > or CramFS. As DOS barely supports any overlay stuff, another question > would be which FreeDOS packages work directly from read-only media. My > guess is: MOST will! I agree that most of BASE (and many more packages) could run without issue on a read-only filesystem. Also with a TEMP dir living on a RAM drive, you could even use I/O redirection (type blahblah.txt | more). For many utilities, a writable filesystem is irrelevant. But for any program that has settings the user may wish to change or updates files (like game scores), it could be a problem. Most programs were not designed to run read-only. > > That means that the RAMDISK and RAM requirements for a FreeDOS live CD > can be a lot smaller, because most packages can be used from their pre- > installed instance which can be part of a normal CD / DVD. > > Only a few would have to be unpacked to a ramdisk when booting in live > CD mode before they can be used. Even that could be tweaked, for example > by asking the user which 1 of the 3 largest packages among those which > need to be on writeable disk should be installed into the ramdisk. I considered this. However, running the entire OS in RAM has some advantages. For instance in a single CD/DVD system, you could swap the disc and install/run programs or games not provided on the FreeDOS release media. > > It would be interesting to see some stats about how much disk space > FreeDOS 1.3 RC1 needs worst case on harddisk (possibly with 32kB per > cluster, too) and how much of that needs to be on writeable media > when considering a live CD. I hope the experts can extract this from > their package list and database. Thanks :-) This is just information for RC1. Not disk space requirements… Total packages: 298 All packages (compressed) 532 MB All packages (uncompressed) 1.1 GB (30,806 files, some source trees contain LFNs and remain compressed) All packlages (uncompressed binaries) 682 MB + 227 MB (compressed sources) = 909 MB (17,653 files + 1 massive source zip) :-) Jerome _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
