DOS ain't dead

"SST - Seek Stopper" -- Caching Needed, Too!

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:35:48 GMT

Reply from Jack, 12.03.2010, 22:35:

> On Wikipedia I found a link to the "SST - Seek Stopper Hard Disk
> Optimizer", a very early defrag utility, which has been released
> to the public domain in 2005 (?) ...

I have used the 1998 "Diskeeper" for Windows/NT for over 10 years,
which functions similarly to "SST".

Disk "defragmenter" programs can gain a bit faster hard-disk speed
by re-arranging data, so no "big" seeks are necessary when reading
existing files. All sectors of a file are on the disk in "linear
order", thus extra seeks are avoided.

Disk "defragmenters" do NOT help when writing files, as DOS cannot
guarantee new files' sectors are written linearly. DOS will give
files the next "free" group of FAT-table sectors, which themselves
may not be in linear order! So multiple output files are usually
written "fragmented", i.e. part of file "A", then part of file "B"
etc.

Also, "defragmenters" made sense in 1986, when hard-disks had seek
times of about 5-msec on 1-track seeks and 30- to 50-msec averages
for the entire hard-disk. These times are 1-msec and 4.5-msec on
"modern" hard-disk drives offered now!

So, a "defragmenter" gets you only so far in improving disk speed.

After a disk has been defragmented, one still needs a disk caching
program with DOS. DOS must still access the disk's directory and
FAT tables for any file, and DOS is written for only single-sector
directory I-O. Reading/writing disks one sector at a time is NOT
efficient, as it LOSES a disk revolution between each sector pair!
Hard disks CAN do multi-sector I-O, but DOS still has its original
1981 "El Cheapo" directory handling, which slows EVERYTHING down!!

Such accesses are mostly eliminated if UIDE (or LBAcache/CDRcache,
if appropriate) is used to CACHE directory and FAT data! Actual
file data will ALSO be cached, and thus a DOS system will run even
faster. FAT, directory, or file data that is "in cache" requires
only a fast move from XMS memory (the cache), NOT a slow "physical
access" of the hard-disk, diskette, or CD/DVD drive.

DOS users should have BOTH a "defragmenter" AND a caching program!

"SST - Seek Stopper Hard Disk Optimizer" found

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 02:13:41 GMT

Reply from RayeR, 12.03.2010, 02:13:

> What DOS extender did AutoCAD use? Most good ones allow you to
> configure to use EMS or XMS, reducing conventional memory, if needed.)

It uses PharLap 386. There's CFIG386.EXE for some runtime settings of its EXE files.

NASM version 2.08.01 available

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:03:04 GMT

Post by rr, 11.03.2010, 23:03:

The NASM developers have released NASM version 2.08.01 on 10 March 2010.

Home page: http://www.nasm.us/
Download: http://www.nasm.us/pub/nasm/releasebuilds/2.08.01/

Changes:
� A number of enhancements/fixes in macros area.
� Support for converting strings to tokens. See section 4.1.9.
� Fuzzy operand size logic introduced.
� Fix COFF stack overrun on too long export identifiers.
� Fix Macho-O alignment bug.
� Fix crashes with -fwin32 on file with many exports.
� Fix stack overrun for too long [DEBUG id].
� Fix incorrect sbyte usage in IMUL (hit only if optimization flag passed).
� Append ending token for .stabs records in the ELF output format.
� New NSIS script which uses ModernUI and MultiUser approach.
� Visual Studio 2008 NASM integration (rules file).
� Warn a user if a constant is too long (and as result will be stripped).
� The obsoleted pre-XOP AMD SSE5 instruction set which was never actualized was removed.
� Fix stack overrun on too long error file name passed from the command line.
� Bind symbols to the .text section by default (ie in case if SECTION directive was omitted) in the ELF output format.
� Fix sync points array index wrapping.
� A few fixes for FMA4 and XOP instruction templates.
� Add AMD Lightweight Profiling (LWP) instructions.
� Fix the offset for %arg in 64-bit mode.
� An undefined local macro (%$) no longer matches a global macro with the same name.
� Fix NULL dereference on too long local labels.

GZIPDATE.REX (uses TOUCH)

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:41:53 GMT

Reply from Rugxulo, 11.03.2010, 19:41:

> FYI, PC Magazine also created 2 touch utils which were available as
> follows:
> touch.com (v7n07.zip) - assembler version with soruce by Michael J.
> Mefford
> touchw.exe (v8n02.zip) - C version by ?? (C ver doesn't like readonly
> files!)
>
> But sadly I am not going to link to either. The reason why if
> my memory serves me correctly is comes down the publisher of PC Mag (Ziff
> Davis) deciding in the mid 90's to contact simtel (and mirrors) and
> legally ask them to remove all the PC Mag utils which at the time were
> widely available.

Yes, I'm aware of that, and yes it's a little silly, considering it limits the usefulness, but oh well, we can't have everything, can we? :-/

> > if not creating a new file (which -C forbids), why open for read/write
> > (3D02)??
>
> No doubt for safety, since read-only is effectively saying "don't touch me".

Except I never thought of readonly in that way. +R usually means (to me) "don't modify the file data" whereas touch only changes the file's time (in the file system itself). It's very rare that someone would accidentally touch a readonly file, but to fair that's why it should probably be optional (e.g. DR-DOS /R or 4DOS /F or FD-TOUCH /C here).

> > debug touch2.com < %0
>
> I seem to remember this may fail on some (newer?) DOS shells and you need
> to do %0.bat on those otherwise the file is NOT found.
>
> if exist .\%0 call debug <%0> if exist .\%0.bat call debug <%0.bat

Yes, that's why I did this at the top (see below). :-)

if not exist %0 %0.bat

BTW, GNU touch (Coreutils, formerly Fileutils, e.g. DJGPP's FIL41B.ZIP) seems to not have the +r bug. However, in my limited experience, it's weird in what it accepts. FreeDOS touch is more forgiving. Heck, even DR-DOS touch whines if you don't specify the year correctly despite the help usage (needs four-digit year or maybe two, I forget). Charles Dye's version is good, but it has no LFN support nor +r override (though it lets you change attributes ... but I dislike removing +r for no good reason).

FreeDOS touch is written in TASM (boo hiss ... but I did a temporary quick hack to NASM which I will have to polish up if anyone cares), but at least it supports various non-US date formats, assemble-time NLS, switchars (anybody use that?), no file lists, no LFNs, DOS 2.0 compatible (QUALPATH.ASM seems to mimic int 21h,60h [DOS 3+]), but only changes modification time (not FAT32 access or creation time). In other words, the best touch util is probably the one in 4DOS, but not everybody uses 4DOS, and it's quite a big util to use just for touching files. ;-)

P.S. Slightly annoying that you have to use a file handle to touch a file instead of a pointer to ASCIIZ, but I guess "open + touch" isn't so much to ask.

EDIT: See int 21h, 57xxh or 7143h

EDIT #2: For the record, I'm pretty sure FreeDOS doesn't update FAT32 time/date-stamps besides creation.

"SST - Seek Stopper Hard Disk Optimizer" found

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:25:00 GMT

Reply from Rugxulo, 11.03.2010, 19:25:

> > On Wikipedia I found a link to the "SST - Seek Stopper Hard Disk
> > Optimizer", a very early defrag utility,
>
> Very interesting find.

Yet another (Turbo) Pascal gem: "defrag 10 MB HD in 8 minutes", no small feat considering the slow cpus of the day! Even though it's limited to 32 MB (FAT12), it's still interesting.

To be honest, (on a semi-related note) I wonder why more tools don't use the FAT directly for greater speed. I guess nobody wants to write their own FAT12/16/32-specific routines (reinvent the wheel), esp. when direct sector access won't work under Windows anyways. Charles Dye's LOCATE does, though, providing greater speed. (I also wonder if some DOS extenders would benefit from this, e.g. wouldn't be limited to 64k at a time when reading from files.)

> > I didn't try running or building this tool. Maybe it's useful to
> someone.

Well, we do have FreeDOS Defrag, which supports other FATs (-16, -32), albeit slowly, but this is a good alternative for reference. ;-)

> The same author of SST; Alfred J. Heyman has also kindly made the source
> available for at least one other program:
> BigShell
> for autocad

Now this is confusing. I guess the larger code size (32-bit) meant less conventional memory free, thus his need to work around it. I didn't really look too closely, but I'm blindly guessing his shell (when run first) saves the state then "restores" it by dumping out / overwriting AutoCAD in memory. (What DOS extender did AutoCAD use? Most good ones allow you to configure to use EMS or XMS, reducing conventional memory, if needed.)

GZIPDATE.REX (uses TOUCH)

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:09:10 GMT

Reply from Arjay, 11.03.2010, 17:09:

> However, the main issue I have with it (among other touch utils) is that
> none seem to allow touching a read-only file! Why? I can't imagine that's
> really a worthwhile protection. At least two (DR-DOS' TOUCH.EXE and 4DOS's
> built-in TOUCH) support overriding it (/R or /F, respectively) but most
> others don't (even Charles Dye's improved version).

FYI, PC Magazine also created 2 touch utils which were available as follows:
touch.com (v7n07.zip) - assembler version with soruce by Michael J. Mefford
touchw.exe (v8n02.zip) - C version by ?? (C ver doesn't like readonly files!)

I only ever used Michael J. Mefford version which from memory never had any problems with read-only files. As for the later C version I have only just come across it whilst relocating these files now and according to the C source it doesn't handle readonly files.... it looks rubbish in comparism to Micheal's earlier assembler version - all of his work was always great IMHO!

But sadly I am not going to link to either. Why? Well in the past PC Mag utils were distributed not only with their magazines and but also widely across Bulletin Boards and ftp sites like simtel.net. Sadly getting hold of PC Mags early utils now days is no longer easy. The reason why if my memory serves me correctly is comes down the publisher of PC Mag (Ziff Davis) deciding in the mid 90's to contact simtel (and mirrors) and legally ask them to remove all the PC Mag utils which at the time were widely available. Thus you will find their utils coming back in most cases but without the underlying files which were removed.

I was never a contacted directly myself but remember this all vaguely as I ran a BBS distributing demos
and also mirroring a lot of Simtel content using Walnut creek's CD-ROM's designed for that purpose!

I seem to remember PC Mag's utils may have then been available online on their website to "existing" PC Magazine customers via their archive but as I'm not an existing customer I don't know if this is indeed still the case.

I was fortunately also a regular PC Mag customer in the past who purchased several years worth of their magazines with their coverdisks. In otherwords I have own legal original copies of their utils in addition to CD-ROM's etc.

> There's also no common way to easily preserve file attributes before
> touching in order to be restored afterwards either,

Hmmm, noted. Remind me of this again in the future for RJDOS (or whatever it might be renamed to) as I'm planning/working on some similiar save/restore features which I could re-implement for attributes etc. In short what I'm working to include (long term) is things like save interrupts, run process, restore interrupts - why? Well for several reasons: 1) provide features to *flag* this type of behaviour. 2) To help provide work arounds for bugs.
Importantly I'm planning to do this across DOS versions as much as possible.

Still back to touch....

> if not creating a new file (which -C forbids), why open for read/write
> (3D02)??

No doubt for safety, since read-only is effectively saying "don't touch me".

> Feedback welcome. :-)
> debug touch2.com < %0

I seem to remember this may fail on some (newer?) DOS shells and you need to do %0.bat on those otherwise the file is NOT found. I can't remember off the top of my head what/where but I definately remember running into that problem.

Last time I ran into this I seem to remember writting lines to test and try both, e.g. something like this (note basic "concept" code below not actual):

if exist .\%0 call debug <%0

if exist .\%0.bat call debug <%0.bat

that way trapping both instances and still allowing ppl to rename the BATch.
As above I can't remember which DOS shell or how/why off the top of my head and the above code is just a non-working example to provide an example.

"SST - Seek Stopper Hard Disk Optimizer" found

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:13:49 GMT

Reply from Arjay, 11.03.2010, 16:13:

> On Wikipedia I found a link to the "SST - Seek Stopper Hard Disk
> Optimizer", a very early defrag utility,

Very interesting find. See also Alfred's informative page about DS Optimize which is what SST became - sadly currently without the source!

> It was written in Turbo Pascal 3.0,

which (for anyone who doesn't know) is now freely available from "Borland's museum" which is now here: http://edn.embarcadero.com/museum - a nice easy to remember URL.... or search "Borland Museum" ;-)

> I didn't try running or building this tool. Maybe it's useful to someone.

The same author of SST; Alfred J. Heyman has also kindly made the source available for at least one other program: BigShell for autocad (ASM/C source) See also other project tabs for interesting background on his other legacy programs (without source) and newer systems. Thanks Alfred!

AHCI projects?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:57:20 GMT

Reply from DOSferatu, 10.03.2010, 16:57:

> This weekend I tried the AHCI.SYS driver from Hewlett packard with my new
> notebook HP Pavilon dv6 and it didn't worked :confused:
> In BIOS I can't set almost nothing so it is very bad.
> Now I want to try to modify the BIOS with Phoenix Bios Editor

Do you know if you have an AHCI compatible controller in your notebook? There may be a very good reason that it didn't work. ;)

Do a PCI device scan, AHCI controllers have PCI registers 9,a,b = 01,06,01

"SST - Seek Stopper Hard Disk Optimizer" found

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:36:06 GMT

Post by rr, 08.03.2010, 22:36:

On Wikipedia I found a link to the "SST - Seek Stopper Hard Disk Optimizer", a very early defrag utility, which has been released to the public domain in 2005 (?).
It was written in Turbo Pascal 3.0, but, due to its age, only supports partitions <32 MiB. So be careful!

I didn't try running or building this tool. Maybe it's useful to someone.

Homepage w/ sources: http://www.spectrum-research.com/V2/projects_sst.asp
Shareware binary: sst201.zip

AHCI projects?

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:41:09 GMT

Reply from Laaca, 08.03.2010, 09:41:

This weekend I tried the AHCI.SYS driver from Hewlett packard with my new notebook HP Pavilon dv6 and it didn't worked :confused:
In BIOS I can't set almost nothing so it is very bad.
Now I want to try to modify the BIOS with Phoenix Bios Editor

HX 2.17 quirk -- R4 (REXX) only accepts uppercase words

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:07:58 GMT

Reply from Rugxulo, 02.03.2010, 04:07:

> presumably also with FreeDOS)

Apparently not! It seems to work there fine. So I dunno why. Weird. :-|

GZIPDATE.REX (uses TOUCH)

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:22:13 GMT

Reply from Rugxulo, 02.03.2010, 01:22:

And here's why I'm using TOUCH at all:

/* REXX */



if arg() = 0 then do

say ''

say 'GZIPDATE.REX -- view or touch .gz file''s stored internal *nix date'

say '( requires Regina or BRexx )'

say ''

say 'gzipdate [-t] myfile.tgz'

say ''

say '-t   touch (else only views internal date; uses external TOUCH.COM)'

say ''

exit 255

end



parse arg option filename

parse version ver



if pos('Regina',ver) = 0 & pos('brexx',ver) = 0 then do

say ''

say 'Regina or BRexx required!'

exit 1

end



if option \= '-t' then filename = option



if filename = '' then do

say ''

say 'No .GZ file specified!'

exit 2

end



ch = charin(filename,1,2)

if ch \= '1f'x || '8b'x then do

say ''

say 'Not a valid .GZ file!'

exit 3

end



ch = charin(filename,5,4)

mydate = c2d(reverse(ch))



if pos('Regina',ver) \= 0 then ,

newdate = date('U',mydate,'T')     /* Unix->USA, not ANSI !! */



if pos('brexx',ver) \= 0 then do

if import('dates.r') = 0 then do

newdate = GMTime(mydate)

newdate = delstr(newdate,pos(' ',newdate))

parse var newdate year 5 6 monthday

newdate = monthday'/'year

end

else do

say ''

say 'Can''t find BRexx''s dates.r'

exit 4

end

end



say newdate   /* Regina: 02/21/10  BRexx: 2/21/2010 */



/*

using Kris Heidenstrom's TOUCH.COM for FreeDOS

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/...

      /1.0/pkgs/touch[xs].zip

*/



if option = '-t' then do

'dir' filename

'touch' newdate filename

'dir' filename

end



/* EOF */

TOUCH.COM 1.4.3 (minor fix: debug script)

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:10:44 GMT

Post by Rugxulo, 02.03.2010, 01:10:

FreeDOS' TOUCH.COM works fine and is well-written (IMHO) although it still needs some tweaking (e.g. convert to NASM or FASM, add LFN support).

However, the main issue I have with it (among other touch utils) is that none seem to allow touching a read-only file! Why? I can't imagine that's really a worthwhile protection. At least two (DR-DOS' TOUCH.EXE and 4DOS's built-in TOUCH) support overriding it (/R or /F, respectively) but most others don't (even Charles Dye's improved version).

There's also no common way to easily preserve file attributes before touching in order to be restored afterwards either, so that's bad for .BAT files. Anyways, in the interest of simplicity (and because it's a minor fix), I wrote a debug script instead of updating the TASM srcs. In short, if not creating a new file (which -C forbids), why open for read/write (3D02)??

Feedback welcome. :-)

@echo off

if not exist %0 %0.bat

if not exist touch.com goto end

if not exist touch2.com copy /b touch.com touch2.com

attrib -r touch2.com

debug touch2.com < %0

goto end



; patch for Kris Heidenstrom's TOUCH.COM 1.4.3 (for FreeDOS)

; Monday 01 March 2010, rugxulo _AT_ gmail _DOT_ com



; what it does: lets -C also permit touching readonly +R files

; int 21h,3D '02'h (read/write) fails to open on +R files



; TODO: convert whole program from TASM to FASM; fix this; add LFN support



;NewCall=09C0

;NewEOF=0145h

;Patch=0146h

;CFlag=058Eh

;ret=0151h



; (only if you want to bump the version number to 1.4.'4' for -F)

;e 127

;34



a 09C0

; former home of "mov ax,3D02", patched with call to fix

call 0146



a 0145

; = 13 bytes below

; (1Ah = EOF / Ctrl-Z marker for "type")

db 1A

mov ax,3D02

test byte ptr [058E],1

jz 0151

; salc

db D6

ret



w

Q

Q



:end

for %%a in (touch touch2) do if not exist %%a.com goto bye

dir touch*.com | find /i "com"

echo on

REM ... generate an error (to prove it didn't work before)

attrib +r touch.com

touch2 touch.com

REM ... try again with -C (to prove it works now)

touch2 -C touch.com

@echo off

dir touch*.com | find /i "com"

:bye

EDIT: Changed ".com" to "com" for some DOS shells.

HX 2.17 quirk -- R4 (REXX) only accepts uppercase words

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:43:55 GMT

Post by Rugxulo, 02.03.2010, 00:43:

R4 (REXX) on Win32 behaves normally. But in DR-DOS + HX 2.17 (and presumably also with FreeDOS), it seems to only work with uppercase. (DOSBox isn't a problem either, so it's not a valid comparison there, sadly.)

echo parse version ver ; say ver > test.rex
echo PARSE VERSION VER ; SAY VER > test2.rex
r4 test.rex

REXX-r4 4.00 28 Jan 2007

http://www.kilowattsoftware.com/r4Page.htm

WDE in NTVDM

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:32:48 GMT

Reply from Japheth, 22.02.2010, 09:32:

> ... it runs in NTVDM now ( exception: CDROM raw mode ). ...

CD-ROM raw mode is supported now. Also, there was an error message if the drive to access was an USB memory stick - apparently NTVDM doesn't like DOS lock commands for such drives. This has also been fixed.