re: Re: MetaKern boot menu alpha release! / XMS-EMS tests

Hi Bernd et al,
I have now installed my MetaKern on my real (not dosemu) Dos as well:
Seems to work, but I have hardly any alternative DOSes installed to
test with. Booting from floppy: Well, why not, but why well? Wouldn't
it be better to use the BIOS for this? Also adds some pseudo-security
if you cannot boot from floppy with such an easy tool as MetaKern ;-).

Thanks for the SHELL syntax which I was looking for. Now I would need
to install DR DOS to have actually TWO kernels - otherwise, I do not
need my own menu at all... :). Well, I have Lilo and Linux. But I wrote
this menu for those that just want DOSes.

UNDELETE works without any user interaction (I am actually encouraging
whoever wants to to write something that CALLS undelete, something that
provides an user interface for it). But your "run from CD" suggestion
has the flaw that UNDELETE will not allow you to save the boot sector
of the current drive to the current drive. You must save it to ANOTHER
drive (however, you can copy it back later). I recommend a RAMDISK if
you are running from CD.

Bonus info: I have tested BITDISK. You must, after doing
DEVICE=BITDISK.EXE (only 256 byte in DOS RAM!)
do (in autoexec)
BITDISK 15000 512 144
to actually FORMAT the ramdisk (here: 15MB, 512by sector size, 144 root
dir entries - limit is 32MB, TDSK allows more...).
Bitdisk runs fine with DPMI16BI and LCD (both usually fail when trying
to access a TDSK created ramdisk, strange!!!).

Finally, I have tested various XMS drivers with Toms FreeDOS emm386:
ALL except his own himem fail (fdxms 0.9, fdxxms 0.9, fdxms286 0.1)
at the point where emm386 tries to map the UMB (error in func 44: first
"out 8bc8 0 0 1" then "out 8bff 0 0 1"). Then, emm386 stays active as
v86 monitor but does not provide UMB or EMS. At some point in autoexec.bat,
I usually get a hang, try to control-alt-delete, and then get an "illegal
instruction" at the jmp word f000:e05b at f000:fff0 (btw, should be ffff:0),
because of a ss:sp of 0:0. In some other situations I get a similar error
because IP reaches ffff (CS=DS=b5, es=aac, ss:sp=19d0:3898).

I then tried with DR DOS emm386: With DPMI=ON MULTI=ON DMA=256
EXCLUDE=c000-c7ff EXCLUDE=f000-ffff INT15=16386 VERBOSE, every single
XMS driver (including none, which means DR DOS emm386 builtin) leads to
MCB chain corruption very soon (kernel panic). I have 96 MB RAM.

What works far better is DR DOS emm386 without DPMI=ON (without any
command line options at all, that is): with all FD*XMS*, HIMEM and none
(builtin), xmstest works, LBAcache and the BITDISK ramdisk work, even with
LCD and DPMI16BI based programs. However, DESCENT always hangs when trying
to initialize the timer, keyboard or sound system (no general protection
fault: without emm386 and with UMBPCI, I get those instead all the time).

Hope you survived my "two subject mail".

Eric


PS: In dosemu, MetaKern works when booting from a floppy image with two DOS
versions on it, as expected. In plain DOS, MetaKern works booting FreeDOS and
MetaKern, but not Lilo (not sure about the details: Lilo loads the kernel,
but then the Linux kernel hangs). My configuration:
1st and 2nd partition are Linux, 1st is active (thus not shown in the MetaKern
menu, MetaKern avoids those unnecessary entries), 2nd is an unused other Linux
version, 3rd is DOS and 4th is extended (also not shown by MetaKern, of course).
So MetaKern offers the 2nd and 3rd partition in the menu, because it cannot
know that Lilo (boot of the 1st partition) already offers a menu item "dos"
that leads to... MetaKern. So in total, for ME, MetaKern is not very useful yet.
Lilo already offers most choices. The only thing *I* would use MetaKern for is
to install two versions of DOS on the 3rd partition.