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

[Jim H. <jh...@fr...>]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 3:00 PM Eric Auer <e....@jp...> wrote:

>
> Hi Ralf,
>
> >> How about first installing to a directory or diskimage stored
> >> in a ramdisk on the host OS, then copying that to mass storage?
>
> > This would be a bit like the old chicken and egg problem. The time you
> > would spend to copy the contents of the FreeDOS distro from the SD card
> > to a RAM disk on the RPi is likely not much faster...
>
> I expect it to be much faster because: You only read from the
> slow SD card and you read fewer, larger files. The bad parts,
> writing many small files, would be on the fast ramdisk side.
> Also, you can start from a FreeDOS ISO on the SD card, which
> again is only one big file to copy from the web to the card.
> When done, you copy one big file, the diskimage, once from
> the ramdisk to the SD card :-)
> [..]


Someone had suggested that option to me - install FreeDOS to a HD image in
a RAM drive, then copy the HD image back to storage.

But I didn't want to explain those extra steps in my article. And really,
installing FreeDOS on QEMU+RPi takes longer, but it's not "all day" long.
It's more like "start the install, and make a cup of coffee while the
install finishes." For a one-time thing, it's not too bad.