Re: Feedback needed on BOOTING, CACHING and some HELPER TOOL

X-Comment-To: Eric Auer

Hi!

6-Ноя-2002 22:34 [email protected] (Eric Auer) wrote to [email protected]:

EA> especially when boot managers are involved). Also, he writes that the MBR
EA> may set the drive number to an arbitrary value before starting the boot
EA> sector. I think for FreeDOS this means you can load the KERNEL from any
EA> drive, but the autoexec.bat / config.sys issue remains (you know, config.sys

     What about next idea: SYS (or other commands) should wrote boot sector
with some unique stamp. Because linking to partition number or its position
is not good choice (partition may be moved by external programs like
PQMagic), time stamp of boot sector writing may be selected.

     Now, when kernel runs, it should remember unique stamp (or complete
boot code with stamp), then it may scan all drives and partitions for boot
sector with same code. If only one such partition is founded, then it may be
counted as C: drive, else should be applied current strategies.

EA>   of DOS memory used :-). The problem is that an element size which is
EA>   smaller than the cluster size could decrease performance, I believe. The

     Not neccessarilly. Do you know that DOS reads/writes only one sector
when data fits?

EA> Finally, I would need some special extra for batch file processing:
EA> something like "dir > @foo" which would store the output of dir in the
EA> environment variable FOO would be nice.

     This example is bad - "@foo" is a valid file name. To handle this issue
more universally someone (kernel or only shell) should handle something like
next UNC: "\\env\foovar". Of course, "env" there should be something
impossible for network names.