Re: [Xen-devel] (free)dos under xen

[Stephan Diestelhorst <Stephan.Diestelhorst@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > I may have already asked this a while ago... would it be possible for
> > dos (free or ms) to run under xen, or does it have to be 'protected'
> > mode operating system?
> >
> > And if dos worked, what are the chances of getting some of the 386
> > extender (dos4gw if I remember correctly) style games working? Or is
> > that precisely the thing that would need to be recompiled to
> > work under
> > xen?
> >
> > If only real mode dos could work, how easy would it be to
> > modify the xen
> > scheduler to simulate a much slower machine?
>
> Now that Xen supports vm86 mode, it probably wouldn't be a huge amount
> of work to get dos or other 16 bit apps working. You'd have to think
> through what to do about IO, though. Possibly hook into the emulation
> stuff that's used for VMX guests.
> Feel free :-)

As Ian suggests, it should work with vm86 enabled. You may wish to start with 
dosbox under linux in dom0, this ought to work. And it doesn't eat up cpu 
cycles like candy :)If you want to run a single DOS on Xen, you will 
definitely have to introduce some "abstraction" layer, similar to the one 
dosbox provides. dos4gw is an interesting beast, it tries different 
interfaces to switch itself into protected mode (DPMI is the one i recall). 
That might result in some neat lowlevel hacking ;) Again, dosbox is said to 
support dos4gw games to some extent, so have a look there!

Cheers,
  Stephan


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