Date: Fri, 13 Oct 1995 16:08:47 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: leisner@sdsp.mc.xerox.com (Marty Leisner) Cc: root@synthcom.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: DOS Emulation under FreeBSD Message-ID: <199510132308.QAA18469@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <9510132157.AA05624@gnu.mc.xerox.com> from "Marty Leisner" at Oct 13, 95 02:57:37 pm
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> > I'd like to help in an effort for the DOS emulation under > > FreeBSD. I'm an X-BIOS engineer and know enough to be dangerous > > in the DOS arena. I'm not FreeBSD fluent, but could be a good > > counterpart to a FreeBSD guru interested in the project as > > well. Let me know how I can help. > > > DOSEMU should do it...my understanding is it does something on > FreeBSD (and works pretty good on Linux...) I think there is room for a large contribution at the DOSEMU level, both in making it work better on BSD and in virtual machine abstraction on the order of the WIn95/WinNT interface. If the machine virtualization were complete, a DOS emulation could run in an X window, and think it was talking to a SuperVGA card. This is INT 10 interface guts. The same goes for INT 21 interfacing to make the DOS machine convert DOS FS accesses into BSD VFS calls (here I go again with "rewrite the kernel file I/O interface 8-)) so that even UNIX file systems can be exported as DOS drives to the virtual machine. A working VM86() interface is a key technology for a *lot* of things, including X support for currently unsupported cards/modes, fallback disk drivers so that BSD runs on all hardware DOS runs on, and used of a virtual machine and ASPI driver to use all CDROM's DOS can use. If you are serious about getting into it, a first quick step would be to make sure DOSEMU runs, and runs well. This is probably nothing compared to support of DOS binaries on non-Intel hardware, something that would be unutterbly cool. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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