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> and so you could install Linux without its own partition right beside DOS. Then you'd use loadlin which would load the kernel into memory and run it, basicall
by cesarb 2y ago
> and so you could install Linux without its own partition right beside DOS. Then you'd use loadlin which would load the kernel into memory and run it, basically shoving DOS out of memory.
It was more than just "install Linux without its own partition". It was "install Linux in a directory like C:\LINUX like a normal DOS application and start it from MS-DOS like a normal DOS application".
It's hard to overstate how important that was at the time. If you had a system running MS-DOS (like most people), with or without Windows 3.x (which also started from MS-DOS like a normal DOS application), you could install Linux without changing anything on your system, and if you didn't like it, you could simply delete the corresponding directory and everything would be gone. That (together with small Linux distributions which ran from a pair of floppies) made it much easier and low-risk to try Linux, and IMHO was one of the things which helped it gain enough marketshare and mindshare to later stand on its own.
(That was my own path with Linux: I started running it as a "normal DOS application" with UMSDOS and LOADLIN, then I moved to a dedicated partition with ext2 and LILO, and finally I discarded MS-DOS completely and gave the whole disk to Linux.)
- woodrowbarlow 2y agohuh, sounds like WSL...
- asveikau 2y agoIt wasn't anything like WSL. WSL runs Linux programs under a different kernel by replicating the syscall interface. This was basically a bootloader (loadlin) and a filesystem driver (umsdos). This was a very different world because DOS was hardly an operating system at all, it was just this tiny thing that installed itself into some interrupt handlers right after BIOS. Loadlin could take over and load a full linux kernel, no different from how grub works today (or LILO before that).
- bri3d 2y agoTo nitpick a bit > WSL runs Linux programs under a different kernel by replicating the syscall interface Only WSLv1 did this. WSL 2 is very boring architecturally, it just runs a full Linux machine in a HyperV VM domain.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago> DOS was hardly an operating system at all Yes, DOS was basically a boot loader and utilities. The EFI shell is modeled the same way, though DOS had fewer address bits available. Netware also used it in this fashion, as a boot loader that may/not initialize hardware. From memory, the next stage of the OS would simply write itself over DOS in memory, move the instruction pointer and go.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoMore like dual booting
- cesarb 2y agoThe difference is that WSL either emulates the Linux system call interface (WSL1) or runs Linux on a VM (WSL2); in both cases, the operating system running the machine is still Windows. With LOADLIN, the Linux kernel completely replaced MS-DOS in memory. To get back to DOS, you had to reboot. Since MS-DOS was a single-task operating system (that is, you weren't normally running anything else at the same time, other than perhaps a few utility TSRs), and it booted quickly (other than the slow memory counting in the BIOS if you had that enabled), that was not a big deal.
- z500 2y agoI wonder what happened with those TSRs after DOS got kicked out of memory. Was it able to reset the interrupt vectors somehow?
- Narishma 2y agoMore importantly, it allowed you to use some hardware that wasn't supported on Linux. I had a sound card that needed a DOS driver to provide Sound Blaster compatibility and this was the only way to use it from Linux.
- ezoe 2y agoHow does it work? I wasn't using computer at that era but it sounds like start running Linux kernel from MS-DOS. Linux Kernel take the control and overwrite MD-DOS from the memory. So there will be no MS-DOS to operate the sound card.
- uKVZe85V 2y agoProbably a "compatible" card that would behave like the standard of the era only after being setup by a DOS driver. Linux, like DOS programs, would find it only after such a setup. Perhaps even the card setup would not survive a reboot.