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DUGL Player 1.0 Alpha1 - DOS SMP (Announce)

posted by FFK Homepage, 01.03.2026, 21:50

>
> I agree that avoiding parallel calls to the kernel is a good solution for
> now. There even were games or demoscene demos which just loaded all data
> before switching to protected mode, so they needed no DOS extender to call
> the kernel from protected mode.
>
> The kernel already has the InDOS flag which helps you to avoid calling it
> while it already is busy. And It is okay to lock the kernel to the first
> CPU core.
>
> If you want to handle multiple parallel kernel calls, you can use the same
> strategy as Windows 3.x in 386enh mode and swap all swappable data of the
> kernel to create relatively independent instances of the running kernel. It
> used that to be able to run multiple DOS windows seemingly in parallel. You
> would have to use a very modern WfW 3.11 compatible FreeDOS kernel
> version.
>
> Of course multi-core DOS could be made arbitrarily complex - there already
> are Jack's UDMA drivers for SATA, but modern disks and SSD support
> multithreaded I/O with several transactions being active at the same time.
> I do NOT think that a DOS kernel should try to do this.
I think that an updated Pthread lib could handle all this. then for any external user it will be completely transparent if it's SMP or not.

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