X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to djgpp-bounces using -f NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 26 May 2014 23:42:49 -0500 From: "Charles Sandmann" Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp References: <201405111842 DOT s4BIgrRx012234 AT delorie DOT com> In-Reply-To: Subject: Re: secret DJGPP documents? Date: Mon, 26 May 2014 23:42:47 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=response Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal Importance: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Windows Live Mail 16.4.3528.331 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V16.4.3528.331 Message-ID: Lines: 53 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 64.91.136.27 X-Trace: sv3-fsfBgj238crZHYWYx/qLI3sw49vO65eSDkGTdyWwCzhC4VuOfqeZLUWNBwMhjryyfBcEOYg2ESZVMcy!grNPvSNHqbWG3fsXINLfOTu0Ct21VE77cRhNwpPhKB0hUfrbvA0KERrqcGZ2iTNgBfrKyhJzYlJC!97GfeGsAesFf5jkbOPB9pSfiuJ9NegU= X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 Bytes: 4315 X-Original-Bytes: 4254 To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com >"Rod Pemberton" wrote in message news:op DOT xft25kb26zenlw AT localhost... >I'm sure you've probably answered this before, but why was a >replacement (MWDPMI) for CWSDPMI planned originally? CWSDPMI required a commercial compiler TurboC (which wasn't free) to build. Later I started building with BorlandC (also not free) when I wrote my own libc routines. The resulting code is not very tight (not a lot of optimization happens without the developer rewriting code to make it happen). It also had some areas of the code which could be cleaned up. The goal was to build with a GNU provided toolchain. Eventually Borland made TurboC free so users could build it themselves. Windows provides built-in DPMI. So the need decreased while the authors' time became less available. When DJGPP v2 was in development, we had concerns about what DOS users would do. Stick with v1? Be forced to buy commercial DPMI to run the free compiler and executables? The original plan was always to have DPMI be fully built with the toolchain (using DJASM and GCC). But that was a big project at the same time we were trying to get v2 feature complete and bug free. So I did a quick modification of DJ's GO32 and got a very minimal DPMI server working in a few weeks of work. Go compare the GO32 source to CWSDPMI sometime. So CWSDPMI was always just another week or so of effort before it would be frozen as good enough and we would work on the next generation. There never were a lot of CWSDPMI releases - r1 to r3 were in 1996, r4 in 1998 ... and the rest was just minor updates and big memory handling. You can probably check the archives for the number of times I said this will be the last release of CWSDPMI. I'm glad other people have had the time and motivation to provide alternatives so I don't have to worry about it. I still hear about distributions using older versions (like r3). Never underestimate the effort to bring something to production that talks at a low level to the hardware. There were issues with some types of machines, or hardware interrupts, that took months to track down and debug with CWSDPMI. In the early releases there were lots of people testing with simple test programs. Still today occasionally I hear about new hardware that doesn't handle A20 quite right (who cares anymore?) But there just wasn't the time (or drive) to finish MWDPMI. I still have an ancient Compaq laptop that DPMIOne will hard hang in some configurations. CWSDPMI had a big installed base, so commercial companies also helped out - like Symantec sending me a patches to work around bugs in Intel chips. They got Intel to help them figure that out ... things dealing with instruction sequences. I also got feedback from id on the Quake user issues early during the betas.