Message-Id: Date: Tue, 21 Oct 1997 14:37:01 +0100 From: Matthias Paul To: opendos AT delorie DOT com, paul-ma AT reze-1 DOT rz DOT rwth-aachen DOT de Subject: Re: disk devices (was ls, killing disk 0) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Disposition: inline Precedence: bulk JP Morris wrote: > > I copied hdd's once: dd if=/dev/hda0 of=/dev/hdb0 ;) > >Evil! Eeevil! > > >Umm, I doubt that you will see this feature, unless Matthias puts it >in his kernel. Though this might be useful in few situations, I do not plan to put it into the BIOS kernel (at least not in the next time), since it would use up to much memory. If the kernel may run in protected mode somewhere in the future, we might add such things... However, someone could write an external device driver to provide such special devices ... >Most people will not want to do this, ever, and it will take up space >in the Kernel. However, the new config.sys operator I mentioned is a >considered possibility. Yes, actually an ! operator and special groups in CONFIG.SYS have both been under my consideration. (And I also had the ! char in mind - appears quite a good choice ;-) ) Both was quite easy to implement, but at present there are more important things to do first, e.g. improving the compression algorithm, adding MS-DOS style boot menus etc., and other things to improve interoperability with other OSes. But, they are on my todo list... I won t stop anyone from implementing new features to IBMBIO.COM, but my current sources have changed so much compared to the original ones, that I might not be able to put your patches in, if they are based on old sources. However, I actually hope this will change soon, and things will be moved into the official BIOS kernel... Matthias PS: There are still several open questions (see at the end of the README.TXT file of IBMBIOA3.ZIP), and I would like to receive your reports... ------------------------------------------------------------ Matthias Paul eMail: Web: http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html