🚀 go-pugleaf

t0e0078@tamsun.TAMU.EDU (Terje Eggestad) writes:

>Have anyone considered to make a msdos shell that runs under the Hurd, 
>something ala the Sun i386 dos command. Or even the possibility to have 
>Unix and dos partitions on the hard disk.

Why not share file systems ? Things like VPIX do that. They map the Unix
file names to msdos ones. With the addition of a msdos file system for
Hurd and the right device drivers you could mount floppy disks and
used them almost like under native dos.

>Personally I would prefer some thing that run side by side, perferablely
>under X11. Some of us would like to run Unix on our home PC standalone
>with out any network. I pretty much had it with the limitations of dos
>and that way dos is patched to bypass those limitations,
>but I still have a lot of programs (binaries) that I wouldn't be without.

The way I would structure it is that dos binaries can be run just like Unix/
Hurd ones can. Just get exec to notice that its a dos binary and load it
with the right emulator. (or this could be done by having a Dos shell that
runs the dos program. ie. set up a script like so:

#!/usr/local/bin/MSDOS /usr/local/dos/bin/msword 

Where .../MSDOS is the msdos shell and msword is a dos package).

>Have anyone ever considered a binary translator between dos and Unix on
>{3/4}86's. As long the dos executables doesn't bypass dos's interrupts and 
>use bios directly, this shouldn't be too unfeasable.

With the emulator(shell), interrupts and "miss behaving" programs could
be handled.

VGA (or at least EGA) graphics could be mapped to X11 so that running a
dos binary on a Hurd system would just startup what looked like a X11
program (I'm not sure of the over head of this across a network).

Another advantage of an emulator is that if Hurd is running on a non-i?86
machine it could also handle the interpreting of the machine code. This
would allow dos binaries to run on any machine, slowly... but run.

The same could be done for other virtual machines such as Mac or Atari.

As an aside, emulators for GEM and Windows could also be written to take
advantage of the "higher level" graphics calls. Just provide device drivers
that simple translate, say, Windows graphics calls to X11 ones.

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