Re: [Freedos-user] Dosidle bundled into FreeDOS future releases

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

Out of curiosity, did FDAPM not prevent high CPU usage? Typically, you
would run this in your FDAUTO.BAT

FDAPM /apmdos


For example, that's what I use in my FDAUTO.BAT, and FDAPM /STATS
shows the CPU is idle about half the time:

C:\>fdapm /stats
Performing action: STATS
Found resident FDAPM / POWER driver version 1.0
Savings mode: BIOS APM plus interrupt hooks (MAX setting)
 CPU was idle 51% of the time


But if I run an app (like As-Easy-As, to run a few calculations and a
line-fit of some x-y data) then the CPU has more real work to do, so
the CPU is idle only one-third the time after I exit the spreadsheet:

D:\APP$\ASEASY>fdapm /stats
Performing action: STATS
Found resident FDAPM / POWER driver version 1.0
Savings mode: BIOS APM plus interrupt hooks (MAX setting)
 CPU was idle 33% of the time




On Thu, Jun 11, 2026 at 8:06 AM Franco Martelli wrote:
>
> Hi everybody,
>
> I was affected by high CPU usage on my FreeDOS 1.4 virtual machine so,
> after a web search, I found the utility DOSidle ¹ and after executed in
> my FDAUTO.BAT it dramatically reduced the CPU usage of almost ten times.
>
> I think that DOSidle ¹ should be a must have for all machines that run a
> DOS operating system on real or virtualization hardware.
>
> How about to bundle it in FreeDOS? Do you agree with my considerations?
> Any criticism?
>
> regards,
>
> ¹
> https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/1.1/html/en/util/dosidle/20120922.4/index.html