Open Source Depot Development

I finally got back my last bit of feedback. It definitely seems that FreeDOS and DOS in general does not seem to be a worthwhile target. There simply isn't enough interest to make the effort worthwhile. I won't rule it out for some time in the future, but clearly it is not of enough interest to warrant a high enough priority to be an essential or early feature.

Having said that, what I am going to do may seem contradictory. For at least the Proof of Concept release, the native API will be DOS based. It is easy, since the code is in place and already running as of the last POC release. Keeping it going for the immediate future will certainly not hurt. Instead, it will help me get to a funtional POC much earlier than any other API would.

I have another old project I may tap into. It is "UNX" and is unix based. It was a new kernel written to take advantage of the Unix v7 and v32 open source releases. I wrote it after porting the original v32 kernel, only to find that adapting it to modern computers would require such radical changes as to be just shy of a rewrite. It was, in fact, faster to write a new kernel than it was to do the rewrite. In UNX, I have an inode based FAT files system and an API compatible with Unix v7. It may be a good resource for Prima v 0.10.

In the mean time, work on the next POC release continues. ACPI memory detection is a pain in the rump. The simple fact that the specification allows for memory holes means that I need to manage an array of memory and not just a simple model as end of kernel to top of memory for our pool of memory. Oh well ...

P.S., The project was called UNX as a nod to the old Digital Equipment Corporation facility where I worked through both Compaq and HP acquisitions. It was where VAX System V was written, as well as parts of Ultrix. Much of OSF/1 was also written there, which eventually became Digital UNIX and later Tru64 UNIX. That facility was shut down by HP in 2006.