Re: [Freedos-devel] I want my 10K

[Rugxulo <ru...@gm...>]

Hi,

On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 11:04 AM <je...@sh...> wrote:
> > On May 22, 2023, at 7:03 AM, Rugxulo <ru...@gm...> wrote:
> > On Mon, May 15, 2023 at 6:48 PM <je...@sh...> wrote:
> >>
> >> Let me show you a MEM print out from my Pentium Pro:
> >>
> >>  NANSI        3,536    (3K)          0    (0K)      3,536    (3K)
> >>  SHSURDRV       400    (0K)          0    (0K)        400    (0K)
> >>  LBACACHE    10,576   (10K)          0    (0K)     10,576   (10K)
> >>  CTMOUSE      3,104    (3K)          0    (0K)      3,104    (3K)
> >
> > NNANSI [sic] can unload, so if you switch to that, all of these can
> > optionally be unloaded (if you put them last) to free up memory. Of
> > course, SHSURDRV will also unload your whole XMS RAM disk, too.
>
> Sure. But...
>
> Even with loading and keeping all that stuff, the system still has 94K free upper memory and 84K of that is consecutive.
>
> Unloading those drivers would not free up the 11K of Low memory used by the Kernel.
> It would just free upper memory of which there is plenty.

My bad, I didn't notice and assumed it was all in conventional.

> The largest executable size is 628K.
> Nothing should every require over 600K of low memory to load.

I agree that 600 kb is too much for any reasonable app, but it does
sometimes happen (esp. games). I think I saw a demoscene app once that
also required that much. Very wasteful. (But even DOS compilers aren't
that lean and mean. Smartlinking and overlays are a lost art.)

> Actually, that MEM print out is outdated for that machine. Just to use up some more upper memory,
> it now loads CWSDMPI at boot. That brings free upper memory down to about 45K. But if upper memory
> gets too low or their are compatibility issues, I’ll stop loading it at boot.

It's 32-bit "DPMI only", no "extensions". So OpenWatcom 32-bit or old
Borland 16-bit DPMI stuff might complain.

You might also want to disable swapping via CWSPARAM for your old hard
drive since it tries to create a CWSDPMI.SWP file by default on C:\
drive.

> Side Note: At boot, the system transfers the main OS files over to RAM disk, reconfigures the environment
> accordingly and primarily runs from RAM. Much better performance. A lot less wear and tear on 25+
> year old drives. Besides, it has got to do something with all that RAM under DOS.

Oh, absolutely, it's way faster in RAM, even compared to USB jump drives.