[Fsf-friends] DMA Drivers for free

[Mani A]

These drivers were not free till very recently. But even though the
source is available now, nothing about reuse and modification have
been explicitly stated in the license. Otherwise it  does ease the
situation for FreeDOS... but not sufficiently enough.

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XMGR, UDMA and UDVD are DOS drivers for an 80386+ system running
MS-DOS V5.0+, EDR-DOS, and all similar DOS variants.

XMGR is a DOS XMS memory manager. It can support V3.70+ UMBPCI by Uwe
Sieber and is able to load directly in UMBPCI upper-memory. XMGR also
runs with MS-DOS V4.49/V4.95 EMM386 or other equivalent "EMS
managers". It is written to V3.0 XMS Specifications and can handle
4-GB of memory.

UDMA is a disk caching driver with internal support for UltraDMA
disks. It intercepts and caches all DOS Int 13h I-O requests for BIOS
devices. UDMA does caching for the UDVD driver and also supports other
"external driver" cache requests. It uses HMA "free space" and can be
loaded in only 1456 bytes of upper memory for up to a 250-Megabyte
cache! UDMA sets its cache in XMS memory and caches from 5 to 750
Megabytes of data for diskettes, hard-disks and CD/DVD drives!

UDVD is a driver for up to 3 IDE CD/DVD drives which may be UltraDMA
or old "PIO mode" models. It accepts file-input requests by SHCDX33C
and other CD "Redirectors", and it also handles DOS "audio" functions.
If "raw" CD/DVD input (audio, track-writers) is unneeded, UDVD caches
data files by calling the UDMA driver, which greatly improves CD/DVD
speed!

"Free use" source files are offered with the XMGR, UDMA and UDVD
binary files. See their README file for full details about these
drivers.

http://johnson.tmfc.net/dos/drivers.html
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The Read-me says :
"XMGR, UDMA, and UDVD are offered as "free software", as-is, and "use at
your own risk", and with NO warranties, not even the implied warranties
of MERCHANTABILITY nor of FITNESS for ANY particular purpose!

Driver questions or comments may be addressed to the website of Johnson
Lam, <johnson at tmfc.net>."

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Best

A. Mani


-- 
A. Mani
Member, Cal. Math. Soc