#85 UEFI BOOT

[Mark Bosch]

Can freedos image be made to run on a GPT partition and boot uefi mode on the new motherboards as legacy is no longer supported on the latest gigabyte boards.
And in the installation script make it create the partition and copy the relevent /EFI/BOOT files for the boot process.

[Oliver]

I am not a developer, but i can tell you, that UEFI support will not happen.
The reason is:
DOS requires a BIOS and it does call BIOS functions. DOS can't work without a BIOS and if your UEFI doesn't provide a Legacy BIOS Mode, than this can't be emulated.

You can also read that on the FreeDOS wiki where you can read:

Support for UEFI?

FreeDOS 1.3 will not support UEFI-only systems. You will need to enable "legacy" or "compatibility" mode in your UEFI to emulate a BIOS.

Since Intel plans to end "legacy BIOS" support in their new platforms by 2020 (in favor of UEFI) users have asked if FreeDOS will be updated to support UEFI. The short answer is No.

Like any DOS, FreeDOS makes use of BIOS for video and disk functions. But even if these functions were moved into the FreeDOS kernel, note that there are many, many existing DOS programs that directly use BIOS to work. FreeDOS cannot "emulate" BIOS for these programs.

http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Releases/1.3#Support_for_UEFI.3F

If you need DOS on a new UEFI-only machine, then Virtual Machines and Emulators like QEMU or Virtual Box are your best option.

With features like I/O MMU virtualization (AMD-Vi and Intel VT-d) on modern x86 CPUs you can pass peripheral devices directly to the Virtual Machine.
This is useful if you need to run DOS software that does require direct access to hardware that is connected to your machine.

[Oliver]

More information about I/O MMU virtualization can be read her:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#I/O_MMU_virtualization_(AMD-Vi_and_Intel_VT-d)

[Steve Sybesma]

There appears to be an independent effort in this direction though I cannot say how successful it will be:
https://github.com/tkchia/biefircate
You mentioned some DOS apps accessing BIOS directly, so not sure if this person is taking that into account.

It would be fantastic if this was a solution.

Another good solution (in my case) is if a bare metal hypervisor (type 1 hypervisor) existed that can accept an install of FreeDOS as a guest OS. The smaller footprint the better.

I have a bunch of Intel Compute Sticks (UEFI-only) with very low storage space that it would be cool to be able to install an OS older than Windows 8 on...DOS would be awesome.

[mirh]

https://gitlab.com/tkchia/muefircate/-/issues/4
The mood seems positive, even though it's far from usable.
Though if any I wished this was mentioned in the wiki or wherever, because people don't even think there is a hope.

p.s. GPT boot is already possible though, be it through stupid specific hacks or a hybrid MBR