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NTVDM speed (or lack thereof) (Announce)

posted by Ninho E-mail, 16.02.2011, 20:04

> > [More DOS-topical : I never found a good DOS task switcher but
> for
> > Windows itself. All DOS task switchers that I tried back then... were
> buggy
> > or deficient or both. IIRC that included taskers from Norton, Central
> Point
> > (when they had not yet become parts of the same entity), DRDOS's
> "tasmax",
> > and more.
>
> Desqview? But that's impossible to legally find nowadays. And BTW, wasn't
> TASKMAX old from DR-DOS 6? Novell DOS 7 / Caldera DR-DOS 7.03 has real
> pre-emptive multitasking (though requires its vaguely buggy EMM386) with
> TASKMGR, if you have a 386 (else task switching for 286). Not everything
> works, of course, but it's okay. In particular, 7.03 (and 7.02?) are closed
> source (natch), but at least their DPMI host (needed for multitasking) is
> much better, e.g. DJGPP and 32-bit friendly (finally).
Indeed I used to be a mostly happy DRDOS 6 user before Win 95 tricked us into switch back to MSDOS, well known story... Never used any of the DRDOS 7's, safe for a handful boot diskettes maybe. Sadly, I can't see myself going back from MSDOS 7.10 to DRDOS (or any other 16 bit DOS) nowadays, even if it were free/libre/accessible. MS won the battle by all means, dirty tactics included, but that's history.


> RDOS claims to be
> GPL/non-commercial, and it supposedly multitasks and has a DPMI server and
> can even allegedly be built (now) with OpenWatcom. But I've never seen any
> mention of a recent binary (only raw disk image from a few years ago which
> I was apparently too dumb to figure out how to boot.) So you could try that
> (in theory) ....
Right, in theory, I could try :=)

>> The only half acceptable thing came later, viz the task switcher
>> included by MS with DOS 5 (?) and DOS 6.0 (retired from 6.2 iirc).

> I assume you mean DOSSHELL, which appeared circa DOS 4. It only did task
> swapping, e.g. only one app at a time but saved the other in conv. mem. It
> wasn't discontinued (I think?) but was still definitely available in
> supplemental pack (DOSSUPL?).

Yep that's it, the DOSSHELL, whose task swapper component was named DOSSWAP.EXE, iirc. Not bad at all on a 286 -IF- swapping to a RAMDisk (old 286 AT clone maxed with 8 Meg RAM! plus a 4 Meg EMS 3.0 board recovered from an even older XT. You wouldn't believe, that was swapping FAST !)

>But yes, clearly they did want everyone to
> also buy Windows (esp. since they exclusively bundled DOS + Win = Win95).
Aren't you happily skipping over Windows 3.0/3.1 ! Win 3 was crappy still, but 3.1 -standard mode- quite fine (and 3.11 WfW, which could be forced to run in standard mode too despite offical claims to the contrary) was really GOOD. In fact Windows 95 "gold" is little more than WfW 3.11 with more modern GUI, plus the "plug and play" thing that we all loved (or did we?)


>> But of course the latter was a stripped down version or at least derived from the Windows 3.x (real or 'standard' mode) DOSSWAP and was OK.

> I think Win 3.1 was better than DOSSHELL, but I haven't tested it lately to
> say for sure. At the very least, it allowed more than just conv. mem.
It was better indeed in that it swapped to extended mem instead of the DOSSHELL swapping to disk - but see my above remark about RAMdisks.


>> Win 2k again : that question about controlling the time quantum - both
>> globally AND per task (process, or thread maybe) is still open, if
> anyone
 >> lurking here has knowledge of hidden parameters (maybe from studying the
>> so-called Research Kernel ?) I'll love to hear from them...

> NT loses lots of ticks doing God knows what, and it doesn't always do the
> smartest thing. Worse is when antivirus or file indexing is running (or
> even Windows update), which slows everything to a crawl. It's much more
> obvious on single core PCs and/or with less than ideal amounts of RAM. It's
> clear that most people don't test very well across a wide variety of
> hardware. NT must be a bear to maintain because clearly they haven't
> organized everything (ahem, registry hack for DPMI limit? really?? 100%
> undocumented too, even better). That and the hardcoded filename flags for
> UAC really seemed inelegant to me. Oh well, nobody's perfect.
As we all can testify. Well...

--
Ninho

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