Re: UMB and 386/486 --> status of FreeDOS emm386 etc.

On Wed, 23 Oct 2002, Alain wrote:

> It is very sad to see that there are quite a few programs to
> manage memory for FreeDOS (I don't even know how many
> because the names are so similar that I got confused) and
> it look like there is a competition between them, but none
> is complete. In fact the only one I see is alive and kicking
> is FDXMS that has an active mantainer and that gets bugs
> fixed. Couldn't we all join our hands and get ONE oficial
> and complete memory manager?

Are you volunteering ;) This is open source, people develop what scratches
an itch. Yes, FDXMS and HIMEM are similar but they have the same origin
(original FDXMS). All the tools we have now are mostly complementary; the
only detail that's missing is VCPI.

Now, Tom isn't interested in DOS32, and I'm only running FreeDOS in real
mode (that is, in my case, not in DOSEMU) about once per month, so it just
doesn't scratch an itch for us.

In other words, we develop software we like to develop, and have a use
for, and we're happy to give it away, but we're not so altruistic as to
develop software for free that we are not going to use ourselves.

Now, when Tom was getting into EMM386 I was helping him a little bit
fixing a few bugs, because I found it interesting, and he helps me too
every now and then. I would do the same if someone would add nearly
complete VCPI support to EMM386. I wasn't going to implement EMM386 myself
at the time and I'm not doing non-trivial development to it now.

BTW the new kernel release candidate will be out this weekend.

Bart