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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it is for customers running weird old legacy hardware (e.g., lab devices, manufacturing, that only runs on DOS).
Would those apps work inside QEMU though? Is it configured to properly pass through the parallel port?
I’m guessing they’re doing this because modern x86 processors can’t boot into BIOS mode anymore (edit: untrue, see reply by dmitrygr). This makes me wonder why they’re even offering FreeDOS as an option when they offer Linux for customers who don’t wish to purchase a Windows license. Maybe they have some sort of contractual obligation with a large customer?
> modern x86 processors can’t boot into BIOS mode anymore This is false. They still can and happily will. Issue is more about vendor not shipping a CSM image. A modern x86 processor will happily run real DOS just fine.
It might not have happened yet, but it seems inevitable.
So I suspect this option is either due to an agreement with MS, or an overly cautious legal department.
And then there’s another OS: UEFI. Something I recently joked about doing was porting SDL to the UEFI environment and then building DOSBOX for it. I’m sure someone has already done this in some fashion, but the idea was amusing enough for me to genuinely consider it one of these weekends. I guess in that case, though, you can’t really run FreeDOS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it is for customers running weird old legacy hardware (e.g., lab devices, manufacturing, that only runs on DOS).
Weird old legacy hardware that only runs on DOS generally requires real-time access to stuff like ISA cards or parallel/serial ports, so this wouldn't work for that use case since the computer doesn't have any of those.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it is for customers running weird old legacy hardware (e.g., lab devices, manufacturing, that only runs on DOS).
FreeDOS is known to not run well inside of virtualization. A proper host install would be far more capable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect it's more bland than that, they need to be able to have a booting/working system otherwise the customer is going to call up support and say their computer isn't booting or that it's saying "no OS found" type messages. It's just to cover themselves, that's why they include enough Linux to be able to load a PDF reader. It should be easy enough to do d:\setup.exe with a USB that has a Windows installer on it,…
Yeah, but why not have something that just uefi boots into a barebones grub2 and then cli only debian-stable and bash shell? Forget the DOS part.
Renegotiating the contract to something sensible like "don't run DOS anymore" was probably hopeless in the face of the bureaucracy, or risked losing to contact.
I’m guessing they’re doing this because modern x86 processors can’t boot into BIOS mode anymore (edit: untrue, see reply by dmitrygr). This makes me wonder why they’re even offering FreeDOS as an option when they offer Linux for customers who don’t wish to purchase a Windows license. Maybe they have some sort of contractual obligation with a large customer?
> modern x86 processors can’t boot into BIOS mode anymore This is false. They still can and happily will. Issue is more about vendor not shipping a CSM image. A modern x86 processor will happily run real DOS just fine.
I’m guessing they’re doing this because modern x86 processors can’t boot into BIOS mode anymore (edit: untrue, see reply by dmitrygr). This makes me wonder why they’re even offering FreeDOS as an option when they offer Linux for customers who don’t wish to purchase a Windows license. Maybe they have some sort of contractual obligation with a large customer?
I suspect it's more bland than that, they need to be able to have a booting/working system otherwise the customer is going to call up support and say their computer isn't booting or that it's saying "no OS found" type messages. It's just to cover themselves, that's why they include enough Linux to be able to load a PDF reader. It should be easy enough to do d:\setup.exe with a USB that has a Windows installer on it,…
At any rate, even if you did find some OS you could install from DOS, you’d be installing it into the QEMU image if you installed from FreeDOS on a system with this arrangement. There’s no way to get back to the bare metal hardware from FreeDOS here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intel phased out the UEFI CSM from new platforms in 2020-2021.
I suppose you could use GRUB and whatever Coreboot has as its BIOS? Either way, sad times indeed when PCs aren't anymore.
EDIT: The answer is yes and it's been done: https://g00se.org/2016/11/seabios-on-libreboot.html (granted, that's booting directly from coreboot to GRUB, but it should be the same booting UEFI to GRUB AFAIK)