Date: Tue, 09 Apr 1996 17:44:19 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: undisclosed-recipients:; Subject: DOS Emulator now available for porting to FreeBSD. Message-ID: <11392.829097059@time.cdrom.com>
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------- =_aaaaaaaaaa To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: DOS Emulator now available for porting to FreeBSD. Date: Tue, 09 Apr 1996 17:44:19 -0700 Message-ID: <11392.829097059@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Some of you may recall some coy comments on my part a few weeks back about something being on the way vis-a-vis DOS emulation for FreeBSD and that we shouldn't be too quick to jump on the Linux dosemu bandwagon. My reasons for refusing to elaborate with more details on this until now were simply that I did not want to jeopardize my negotiations with BSDI through Keith Bostic, whom I approached at USENIX '96 about a possible "partnership" arrangement whereby we would get their DOS emulator, something FreeBSD has needed for quite awhile, and BSDI would get a bunch of extra people hacking on it, improving it in various ways and, of course, feeding those changes back to BSDI as part of the bargain. Well, I'm very pleased indeed to announce that after some months of negotiations, Keith has managed to convince the powers-that-be within BSDI to do the deal, allowing me to now speak more freely about it! Since this emulator was originally written for BSD/OS, I don't expect its integration into FreeBSD to be entirely painless, and it will take some dedicated work to merge it in while ensuring that we don't break anything in the BSDI support (which would not be part of the deal!). I would therefore like to call for all the people who've expressed an interest in working on this (or would like to express an interest now) to "step forward" as it were and declare their participation to the hackers@freebsd.org mailing list so that we may coordinate our efforts. I have also made the following resources available to those doing the development: 1. The original sources to the BSD/OS DOS emulator, as well as the first BSDI supplied patch to it, are available from: ftp://freefall.freebsd.org/incoming/rundos.tar.gz ftp://freefall.freebsd.org/incoming/rundos.tar.gz.PATCH-1 2. In order to ensure that we don't break BSDI compatibility along the way, I've also installed BSD/OS 2.01 on one of my machines and will give accounts on the box to anyone working on the project. Just send me a passwd line or point to an existing one on freefall if you already have an account there and I'll send you the login information. I'm really enthusiastic about this project, not just for what it represents in finally getting ourselves a working DOS emulator but also for the chance to finally do something in cooperation with BSDI. One of us may be commercial and the other not, but we're both solidly in the BSD camp and I think we have a lot more in common than many other parts of the operating systems community - I'm very happy at the precedent we have a chance to set here. Paul Borman <prb@bsdi.com> is our contact at BSDI on this project, though I would really rather prefer that our dealings with him go primarily through one or two people at most. The last thing we want to do is swamp the poor guy with email and make him regret that this ever happened! That said, if you do find something in the code that you feel would be of direct interest to him, then certainly by all means contact him personally, but let's just try and keep it from becoming a stampede! :-) Finally, if you've ever had any interest at all in seeing DOS emulation come to FreeBSD then please do consider volunteering some time to this effort - your contributions will be crucial - and certainly don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions! Jordan ------- =_aaaaaaaaaa--
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