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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

How does freedos handle newer hardware? I remember giving up on my super DOS boot disc about a decade+ ago when it wouldn't boot anymore. If memory serves it was around the end of IDE drives, but I could be wrong. Maybe it had to do with EFI.

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FreeDOS, like MSDOS, relies on BIOS calls to control the hardware. Most PCs aren't pure EFI-only and can still boot with some BIOS compatibility, but of course not all of the BIOS implementations are bug-free.

When legacy BIOS compatibility is truly dead, I guess DOS will die with it.

I would assume...(guess?) that FreeDOS will continue to exist in VM's to support extremely old industrial control systems (for example, one of the major dairy plants in my hometown of Phoenix, which still uses [last I checked, 2016] software running in a VM on actual DOS). Beyond that however, maybe outside of educational scenarios, I can't see it sticking around much longer as the move to pure EFI continues full steam.

I suspect that when we get computers that are pure EFI and completely free of legacy BIOS, it will be possible to use something like SeaBIOS to continue to add back BIOS compatibility for use with tools like FreeDOS.

I've tried booting FreeDOS on my Chromebook with SeaBIOS installed, and it just does not handle it well. The system will completely lock up when running most programs or even just by hitting the Tab key. FreeDOS doesn't even boot unless I have it skip loading AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS on startup.

Thanks for posting that. Sounds like SeaBIOS or FreeDOS.

Weird that your decade old computer wouldn't boot DOS, I've booted MS-DOS on my previous i7 4770K computer from an external floppy disk drive. I tried some CGA games i wrote and they kinda worked with the exception of BIOS not supporting text in CGA mode.

But to answer the question, FreeDOS like MS-DOS and DR-DOS has drivers in the form of TSRs and DEVICE=blah.sys files. The only drivers it needs itself is for disk and basic video output, which are provided by the BIOS.

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