DOS ain't dead

rebuilding NASM 0.98.39 (2005) for 16-bit 8086 host (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 16.03.2020, 01:24

> Probably I need to go in (insns.pl??) and disable anything past 586.
> (Why bother with SSE2 in such a limited environment?)

Assuming that was intentional, by design, and not bugged, I used AWK to modify insns.dat to avoid anything past 586. Then I used (DJGPP Perl) insns.pl to rebuild some sources (see makefile.in). Then NASM still compiled okay (with TC++) but crashed when run (invalid opcode) without warning, even when used with no args. So either I'm misunderstanding or it needs even heavier fixing.

Should I rebuild 0.97 instead? Not quite as good (no size optimizations via -O3), but at least it's smaller (586/MMX only). But there's probably all kind of old bugs. (IIRC, the prebuilt DOS binary included all output formats, ugh, such a waste of RAM.) N.B. I already used AWK to read the .LST and auto-fix the source of PSR Invaders so that NASM 0.97 will 100% match in size optimizations, but that's quite a kludge.

> Rebuilding the FreeDOS kernel ran out of memory (Turbo C++ build only), but
> apparently it works when not run under WmakeR. So the bloody Make program
> is eating too much (scarce) conventional RAM!

A quick look at the (OW 1.9) Tools manual didn't show anything about Make swapping. Probably it isn't supported or wasn't a huge priority. I haven't looked into 2.0-pre, but it's probably no improvement.

Turbo C++ 1.01 (Make 3.0?) has .SWAP (or -S option) to swap to disk (saving 50k of low RAM). DMake (4.00pl2?) lets you put % before commands to do the same (saving about 100k of low RAM).

> Also, it's annoying that it doesn't even tell you how much
> memory was free, how much was used, nor how much was unsuccessfully
> (mis)allocated. I haven't checked closely to see what debug hooks or
> instrumentation they included

-DLOGALLOC writes to malloc.log (big!), but I'm not sure that's quite what I wanted to know either.

Complete thread:

• rebuilding NASM 0.98.39 (2005) for 16-bit 8086 host - Rugxulo, 14.03.2020, 08:13 (Developers)
  • rebuilding NASM 0.98.39 (2005) for 16-bit 8086 host - Rugxulo, 16.03.2020, 01:24
    • rebuilding NASM 0.98.39 (2005) for 16-bit 8086 host - rr, 16.03.2020, 15:22
      • rebuilding NASM 0.98.39 (without MMX/3DNOW/686/SSE) - Rugxulo, 17.03.2020, 05:20
        • rebuilding NASM 0.98.39 (without MMX/3DNOW/686/SSE) - ecm, 17.03.2020, 06:58
          • rebuilding NASM 0.98.39 (without MMX/3DNOW/686/SSE) - Rugxulo, 22.03.2020, 00:48
            • rebuilding NASM 0.98.39 (without MMX/3DNOW/686/SSE) - ecm, 22.03.2020, 10:13
              • rebuilding NASM 2.09 and NASM compatibility - ecm, 22.03.2020, 11:45
            • rebuilding NASM 0.98.39 (without MMX/3DNOW/686/SSE) - ecm, 06.09.2020, 23:09
        • rebuilding NASM 0.98.39 (without MMX/3DNOW/686/SSE) - Rugxulo, 22.03.2020, 00:42
          • rebuilding NASM 0.98.39 (without MMX/3DNOW/686/SSE) - marcov, 22.03.2020, 13:08
            • CMOV - ecm, 22.03.2020, 14:26
              • CMOV - marcov, 22.03.2020, 18:32
                • CMOV - marcov, 23.03.2020, 12:52
            • rebuilding NASM 0.98.39 (without MMX/3DNOW/686/SSE) - Rugxulo, 23.03.2020, 04:27
              • NASM 0.98.39 (MSC 7, "286", not full instruction support) - Rugxulo, 24.03.2020, 20:36
                • NASM 0.98.39 (not full instruction support) - Rugxulo, 24.03.2020, 21:16
                  • NASM 0.98.39 (not full instruction support) - ecm, 24.03.2020, 22:55
                    • NASM 0.98.39 (not full instruction support) - Rugxulo, 24.03.2020, 23:17
                  • NASM 0.98.39 (not full instruction support) ... LOADALL - Rugxulo, 31.03.2020, 20:07
              • rebuilding NASM 0.98.39 (without MMX/3DNOW/686/SSE) - Rugxulo, 13.04.2020, 07:16
            • deprecated MMX and obsolete 3DNow! - Rugxulo, 24.03.2020, 17:54