Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS is slow in Raspberry 4

[Swap J. <sw...@zo...>]

So it's feasible! That's great news! A 486 or Pentium would be great!

Can you give me the links for these discussions? I'll visiting them in 
hope that maybe someone in the future might have found a solution.

And in the meantime I'll try Fedora ARM, just in case it matters on the 
RPi4.

Just some fun background: This is a project to create a dedicated DOS 
computer (it'll boot Linux and then straight to QEMU and FreeDOS) to use 
as a place to calm down and be more productive. And play classic games ;-)

On 2020-03-18 18:44, Jim Hall wrote:
> Actually, I think it's a problem on the Raspberry Pi 4. I've heard from 
> a few folks since the RPi4 came out that my how-to about running FreeDOS 
> on the Raspberry Pi (via QEMU) 
> <https://opensource.com/article/18/3/can-you-run-dos-raspberry-pi> results 
> in a very slow FreeDOS. But I've only heard from people about the 
> Raspberry Pi 4. The RPi3 seems to work okay. I have a Raspberry Pi 3, 
> and it works fine. I've run my RPi3 with both Raspbian and Fedora ARM 
> with the same results, so I don't think it's a distro issue, either.
> 
> The Raspberry Pi (as lease version 3) is fast enough to emulate a '486 
> or Pentium CPU well enough to run DOOM and AsEasyAs and other DOS games 
> and applications without lag.
> 
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 11:17 AM Ralf Quint <fre...@gm... 
> <mailto:fre...@gm...>> wrote:
> 
>     On 3/18/2020 6:31 AM, Swap Jim via Freedos-user wrote:
>      > FreeDOS is very, very slow on QEMU running in a Raspberry 4.
>      >
>      > It's drawing the screen line by line when I do a DIR on C:\, with
>     only
>      > 7 directories and files in it. It's worse in full screen.
>      >
>      > For those of you that run FreeDOS on a Raspberry, can you offer a
>     tip
>      > to make it go faster?
>      >
>      > Here is some more info.
>      >
>      > It's a Raspberry Pi 4 B+ with 4GB of RAM. I'm running the latest
>      > Raspbian. I couldn't manage to install QEMU from apt, so I've
>     compiled
>      > version 4.2.0 with these flags:
>      >
>      >   ./configure --target-list=i386-softmmu --disable-vnc --enable-sdl
>      >   make 'CFLAGS=-Wall -g -O2 -w'
> 
>     That is a problem of QEMU, not FreeDOS.
> 
>     What some people are forgetting (had the exact kind of discussion in a
>     vintage computer forum just a few days ago) is that in this case, QEMU
>     needs to completely emulate an x86 CISC CPU on an ARM RISC CPU,
>     including converting all data on the fly between little-endian and
>     big-endian format on the fly, all the time.
> 
>     This is a complete different situation for example than emulating a
>     16bit x86 PC system on a 64bit x86 host system, like running DOSBox or
>     VirtualBox. While the later doesn't (in 64bit mode) support 16bit
>     operation anymore, it is still the same basic underlying CPU
>     architecture, and the same data "endian-ness".
> 
>     Ralf
> 
> 
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