Mail Archives: djgpp/2012/05/18/18:45:03
Hi,
On May 18, 12:12 pm, Georg <dos DOT DOT DOT AT googlemail DOT com> wrote:
>
> You could buy a PC without operating system and then install Linux
> from a DVD.
Make sure your network card is supported, though (among other things)!
> GCC supports 64bit on Linux. So all that needs to done is that Charles
> Sandmann quickly writes a 64bit DOS extender and DJ Delorie ports GCC
> 64bit to DOS. ;-))
Before someone starts saying this is impossible, I'm "fairly" certain
it's not. VT-X really would allow a lot of this to work, but how much
I'm not sure. "Unrestricted guest mode execution (real mode, big real
mode)" of Intel's Nehalem sounds promising, not to mention pre-
existing support of AMD for "paged real mode". But I haven't tested
thousands of apps (obviously), so who knows.
Anyways, (they will tell you) there's no need for such a DOS64 with
all the existing solutions and workarounds, and it would be a lot of
work for little gain. And DJ and CWS are both extremely busy, as
always, apparently, so I don't think they are free to do anything like
this, even if they wanted.
Even if we were able to do this, it still wouldn't fix the reliance on
the (deprecated?) BIOS, single tasking, lack of drivers for tons of
modern hardware, nor would it fix all old apps to magically use more
than 2 GB of RAM (libc issue). Strange to say, but our best bet may
indeed be piggybacking atop a lean TtyLinux with DOSEMU. At least
DOSEMU with DJGPP works fast on either 32-bit or 64-bit. I don't know
if DOSEMU supports VT-X, though, and last I tried using it under x64
(years ago, XUbuntu 8.04), pure 16-bit stuff was dirt slow. It has
some mention of a JIT, but I don't know what it does, never bothered
looking.
I know I'm rambling too much about all this, and it's far beyond me
technically, but hopefully this clears up some stuff.
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