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I wonder if FreeDOS has anyl relevance in our modern cloud-based VM world, where a real-mode operating system could serve as a razor thin wrapper for running ap
by torginus 2y ago
I wonder if FreeDOS has anyl relevance in our modern cloud-based VM world, where a real-mode operating system could serve as a razor thin wrapper for running applications on virtual machines with minimum overhead.
In these scenarios, having another layer of memory protection and pre-emptive multi-process multitasking might be completely unnecessary.
- arghwhat 2y agoNo, the technology serving what you're describing is microVMs, or taken even further, unikernels. FreeDOS has no technical relevance other than its intended purpose of continued support for legacy DOS applications on modern hardware - which is perfectly fine.
- gwbas1c 2y agoLast time I wanted to run an old DOS game, I used DOSBox. (But it appears DOSBox isn't actively maintained)
- denkmoon 2y agomore for running oem firmware tools and such than dos games.
- arghwhat 2y agoNot anymore, it's either signed EFI binaries or handled live from user space (with LVFS covering the Linux side). Sometimes vendors still ship boot images, but nowadays it's likely a small Linux live ISO.
- sirwhinesalot 2y agoWith how fast hardware is these days, full hardware emulation of old motherboards/CPUs/etc. is better, as in PCem
- p_ing 2y agoDOSBox-X is actively maintained. https://dosbox-x.com/ https://dosbox-x.com/
- bni 2y agoor DOSBox Staging, https://www.dosbox-staging.org https://www.dosbox-staging.org
- dspillett 2y agoReal mode would not be an efficiency gain at all on modern CPUs. Even if they were not the case I think it would only have any use between containers and full VMs when you want more separation than the former but less weight than the latter, and there are various existing microVM options that seem to have a handle on that space.
- diggan 2y ago> I wonder if FreeDOS has anyl relevance Well, just yesterday I had to run FreeDOS from a USB in order to run a sas2flash utility that didn't run on Linux or directly via UEFI, so I could flash some firmware to a SAS controller. Seems at least some of us still need it :) Btw, avoid getting a SAS controller if you can, and get a motherboard that directly supports as many SATA drives as you need. Few things have been as frustrating as dealing with this SAS controller thing.
- vin047 2y agoOff-topic, but what SAS controllers are you having trouble with? Was going to get some for my NAS, would be good to get some insight on what to get and expect!
- diggan 2y agoAs mentioned in the other comment, the controller shipped with IR firmware, while I wanted IT firmware on it, so all drives shows up in the OS, instead of doing hardware RAID. I don't think this specific controller is more/less problematic than others, just that all the tooling around SAS seems to suck. At first I couldn't get sas2flash to work on Linux, so ended up trying to boot an UEFI shell with sas2flash.efi instead, which refused to work seemingly because of some motherboard/UEFI version/controller incompatibility. So ultimately I used FreeDOS to finally be able to run sas2flash, so I could flash the IT firmware. Maybe I'm spoiled, but overall it's been a somewhat confusing journey. And today I also started looking into getting LTO8 for long-term backups, probably will be even worse, judging by the docs I've gone through so far...
- rekoil 2y agoWhen I have to deal with a SAS controller my go to is always to see if it's possible to flash it with IT (initiator/target) firmware so that it just becomes basically pass through disks for the OS to handle however it pleases.
- diggan 2y agoYes, this is exactly why I had to dive into that rabbit hole, since the controller arrived with IR firmware and I need it to run IT...