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Open Source DOS Sound standards! (Developers)

posted by bretjohn Homepage E-mail, Rio Rancho, NM, 03.01.2013, 20:00

> Do you think that moder CPUs HW virtualization extension could solve it
> even in pmode? But if it's not too complex to use it under DOS... This
> would be interesting project as currently near every new desktop PC has CPU
> with VTX.
It theoretically could, but that's not the route the VM's are taking. For USB, e.g., what's happening (at least with some VM's, like VMWare and VirtualBox) is that the guest OS (DOS) is expected to provide its own USB drivers for "uncommon" devices like printers. The VM virtualizes the USB host controllers, but doesn't virtualize the USB devices -- it makes the guest OS provide its own drivers for the actual (not virtualized) devices. Even the virtualization that is provided for "necessary" devices like keyboards and mice is less than optimal, and I see that getting worse over time rather than better.

VM's, while nice in some respects, are certainly not the panacea a lot of people seem to believe them to be. If you are content to live within the limitations a particular VM chooses to confine you to, go for it. I am not.

> BTW it would be quite easy to implement own SMI routines (i think it's
> written in C) in Coreboot/Seabios but unfortunatelly it supports still very
> few modern motherboards.
I see several problems with that route, too. First of all, as you already stated, a lot of hardware isn't (and probably never will be) supported. There's a lot of old hardware out there still in use, and a large percentage of it doesn't even have hardware virtualization capabilities. There's PC/XT class hardware out there still in use (30 years old) -- what makes you believe the hardware we think is "unusably ancient" today (more than a couple of years old) won't still be in use somewhere in the world 30 years from now?

Also, AFAIK, SMM (or any type of hardware based virtualization) isn't virtualized in any VM (I could be wrong about that, though). If so, such virtualization techniques could only be used in "real" DOS on relatively modern hardware, not in a VM. In a VM I think your only option is software virtualization, which is very difficult to accomplish and much more limited in capabilities.


My opinion, FWIW.

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