The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option (2022)
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blog.tmm.cx
I have always wondered why you could not have a 64-bit native dos, The answer I have come up with is that it would not be dos because it would not be compatible with dos programs. the second perhaps more important reason is that, sure dos is an operating system. but it leans really hard on the pc firmware, the bios. if you squint right, the bios could be considered the actual OS and dos just a shell on it. And the bios has a lot of legacy cruft and limitations, modern pc operating systems ditch the bios as fast as possible and lean on direct access. But in that light the modern 64-bit native dos might be the uefi shell.
Conclusion. As a big unix snob, I don't really like dos all that much and it have little nostalgia for it. I suspect HP could(and do it appears) get away with a minimal console only linux install for their firmware flashing needs. but the long tail of low level dos tooling for the PC world is still hanging on.
The big missing feature preventing the UEFI shell from being a modern DOS is the lack of multitasking. DOS didn't support this very well, but it did have the concept of TSRs. The UEFI shell has no equivalent.
Historically, the FreeDOS option existed because Microsoft banned OEMs who sold computers with Windows from also selling computers without an operating system because they thought it would encourage software piracy. OEMs didn't want to have to provide end-user support for Linux or other alternative OS's, so they instead decided on FreeDOS since it qualified as an OS, but was basic enough that nobody would actually use it. Before anyone mentions old industrial/scientific equipment, that stuff all depends on hardware ISA cards or physical parallel/serial ports so it's irrelevant on a prebuilt computer made in the past 20 years. I'm not sure why FreeDOS is offered here since there's also an Ubuntu option for people who don't want to pay for a Windows license.
In this case, because the FreeDOS installation is inside a VM, it won't let you do BIOS updates or whatever since the VM doesn't have access to the computer's physical hardware. I imagine what happened was that HP had a hard drive image they'd been loading on PCs since the early 2010s set up to dual-boot FreeDOS and a Debian kiosk installation with the digital manual. Someone at HP was tasked with making the image work on newer computers that didn't have firmware support for booting in BIOS mode, so they came up with the solution of booting up a copy of Debian that then auto-starts a FreeDOS VM.
Seems likely, yeah.
I wonder why HP still bothers to offer the FreeDOS option, rather than just ship with no OS installed; Microsoft doesn't actually care about OEMs shipping with no OS installed anymore, do they?
Embrace, extend, extinguish. /s
They do care. Else you would see other OSs on new hardware.
Like Dell shipping laptops with Linux preinstalled?
Unless one is buying components themselves, computer shops have to provide an OS pre-installed.
Why MS-DOS clones instead of GNU/Linux? That tells how much they actually care.
IIRC this is by design. The operating system consists of two components: the Basic Input/Output System is specific to a computer model and provides routines with a standard interface to access the computer's peripherals, and the Basic Disk Operating System provides higher-level routines and human interfaces based on that. This was in CP/M. Then it was possible to produce alternatives to BDOS using the same BIOS interfaces.
The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31389893 - May 2022 (149 comments)
However. Suppose someone took this seriously and plugged in, say, a USB floppy drive (they exist[ed], I have one) in order to run themselves some genuinely old Wordstar or or Lotus 123 or Turbo Pascal from ancient disks they still have. Does the rabbit hole go that deep, i.e. the appropriate QEMU device mappings are in place? What about running a DOS based TCP/IP thing... would it see the ethernet port, or if absent, a USB ethernet dongle?
Drivers, 64bit evolution and hardware utilities, but nothing more.
OK.
When the entire point of the article is that the FreeDOS option DOES NOT BOOT DOS then when someone did not notice that, this indicates that they did not read even the first screen of text on their phone, and that level of inactivity to me means "you are not contributing to the discussion here, you are detracting from it."
Others mileage may vary. Even the mods'.
Numerous examples in: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
And if the point seems to bear a more explicit mention, well, There Are Ways:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40837625>
Trust me I feel your pain, but HN guidelines are aimed at steering threads back on track if that's remotely possible. That's usually a Good Thing of itself.
Can I install Win311 on it!?
Interesting. Do you think this is because the GPU’s support has bitrotted due to lack of testing? Or something else?
There's a lot of fiddly details to fully cover VGA. And very few people using it still, so there you go. Kind of a shame, because some of the features are super handy for hobby OSes; scrolling the screen by moving the start address is so much nicer than scrolling by copying, but you can't do that with a frame buffer that UEFI set up for you. Text mode is handy too, although 8-bit characters is problematic; UEFI's boot services has a text mode console, but when you exit boot services, you've got to render text on your own.