[HN Gopher] The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option
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The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option
Author : erik
Score : 153 points
Date : 2022-05-15 18:45 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.tmm.cx)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.tmm.cx)
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Imagine being the engineer tasked with creating this bizarro
| system.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| What gets me is... what's the _point_? If you don 't want to
| fight MS about selling PCs with no OS, ship some Linux distro.
| DOS was a nice option when you needed to support bare-metal stuff
| like flashing the BIOS without a modern OS getting in the way,
| but I would be _shocked_ if that worked here - basically, I can
| see reasons to ship DOS, but they 're all mutually incompatible
| with a virtual machine. And if you're going to ship a Linux
| distro - heck _even_ if you 're going to include some weird DOS
| VM - why would you _ever_ ship multiple different versions?
|
| So yeah, I'm thinking horribly broken company process and/or
| outsourcing without actually making sure the requirements make
| sense.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > If you don't want to fight MS about selling PCs with no OS,
| ship some Linux distro.
|
| And that's exactly what they're doing. They just did the bare
| minimum work to be able to fit that Linux setup under their
| pre-existing "FreeDOS" SKU. And the real point of that SKU is
| for sophisticated users to wipe the whole thing clean and set
| up their own OS install. It still works perfectly for that.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Shipping your PC with "some linux distro" means you have to
| support that linux distro.
|
| Selling it with freedos, you only have to support freedos, and
| people who buy that option will install something else anyway.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| They've been doing it for 20 years, so I'd guess that there is
| some sort of contractural rationale between HP and Microsoft.
|
| HP ships Ubuntu in thin clients by default. So the fact they
| are doing this implies some specific reason.
| mc4ndr3 wrote:
| Ghastly.
| Maursault wrote:
| Kind of random, but the article reminded me. I think every pdf
| should have it's own linux installation. They should role it
| into the pdf specification. You never know when that might be
| useful.
| userbinator wrote:
| I know you're half-joking but there's actually been a few
| "bootable PDF" articles on HN before.
| jchw wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Possibly relevant: an NES emulator for UEFI:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Juc1LT7Xls
| bayindirh wrote:
| Also, don't forget the Minix running inside a small embedded
| processor inside your processor or platform controller.
| [deleted]
| timClicks wrote:
| I occasionally wonder what an operating system running below
| ring 0 would be used for. I haven't thought of anything
| compelling, apart from being a backdoor.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| I am sure they will soon find a way to add a hypervisor to
| Minix so they can add yet another layer to the mix.
| bayindirh wrote:
| That'd be fun. Intel would be providing services to
| customers for running their own spy platform on any
| supported Intel processor.
|
| Not unlike "Other OS" on PS3. Same theory, different
| application.
| ndiddy wrote:
| 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?
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > 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.
| yuhong wrote:
| toast0 wrote:
| Intel's been threatening to cut off everything non UEFI for a
| while... I think I read the iGPU in Alder Lake doesn't work
| unless you're running UEFI?
|
| It might not have happened yet, but it seems inevitable.
| userbinator wrote:
| That's probably because it doesn't have a traditional
| VBIOS.
|
| ...which makes me wonder whether it's possible for the
| community to write one, given how much docs and source code
| Intel have released for their GPUs. Of course, how VGA-
| compatible it is is another thing to consider.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Thank you for the correction! I saw multiple news articles
| several years ago saying that Intel would be dropping support
| for BIOS mode by the end of 2020, but it appears they've been
| dragging their feet. In the meantime, they seem to have been
| making moves in other ways, such as not supporting BIOS mode
| when booting with integrated graphics on 11th gen processors
| ( https://www.asus.com/us/support/FAQ/1045467 ).
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Hypothetically if you wanted to use something like FreeBSD,
| Dragonfly BSD or maybe OpenSolaris? This is a big reach.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The big market for this is K-12 schools.
|
| Microsoft has a licensing program for .edu that doesn't require
| an "embedded" hardware license. There are also many places
| using Neverware to provide Chrome desktops while using the some
| warranty services, etc that they have with PCs.
|
| If you buy alot of computers, you can get desktops crazy cheap.
| Big enterprise buyers get low-spec desktops for ~$225 without
| windows or $300 with. If you don't care about power/footprint,
| they are the best value thin client. Schools are _huge_ PC
| buyers, some districts have >300k students, so you're easily
| talking 40-70k PCs annually.
| mcculley wrote:
| Maybe it is for customers running weird old legacy hardware
| (e.g., lab devices, manufacturing, that only runs on DOS).
| wmf wrote:
| Would those apps work inside QEMU though? Is it configured to
| properly pass through the parallel port?
| walrus01 wrote:
| Highly unlikely, without really messing around with it.
| mcculley wrote:
| Maybe, but wouldn't the customer have to know how to run
| QEMU? I am imagining a customer who wants to just replace
| an old machine while changing as little as possible.
| djur wrote:
| Since this install is based on QEMU running in Linux, it
| would not meet that need.
| mcculley wrote:
| The end user need not know it is QEMU atop Linux. They
| see and use DOS.
| ndiddy wrote:
| 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.
| mcculley wrote:
| I have a weird old nylon cutting machine connected to a DOS
| machine over a serial port. It would not work with a
| USB/RS-232 adaptor?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| USB-serial conversion would add a measurable amount of
| latency, and the access to USB hardware would occur under
| a non-real-time OS. Whether the setup "works" would be
| highly hardware-specific. There are modern industrial
| "PC" boards that are essentially a i586 implementation in
| a SoC and can run these workloads far more reliably,
| while consuming a lot less power compared to old x86
| hardware. (They're also of interest to retrocomputing
| enthusiasts, for largely the same reasons.)
| [deleted]
| mc4ndr3 wrote:
| FreeDOS is known to not run well inside of virtualization. A
| proper host install would be far more capable.
| mcculley wrote:
| But a proper host install is not possible on modern
| hardware.
| joshcryer wrote:
| 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, with this setup.
| walrus01 wrote:
| 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.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| It's probably more like they have DOS support contracted
| out to some vendor. And when the systems upgraded to the
| point of not being able to run DOS natively the vendor
| built this franken-OS to fulfill the contract.
|
| 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.
| JonathonW wrote:
| Windows installers are bootable these days (from DVD or USB;
| doesn't matter); they haven't been runnable from DOS for a
| couple decades now.
|
| 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.
| john_moscow wrote:
| Knowing how big corporations usually work, dropping the FreeDOS
| option completely due to incompatibility would require approvals
| from 7 layers of corporate management, while shipping a half-
| assed version that is not usable for any practical purposes only
| took one nerd from engineering.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I can't find a source for it, but my recollection is that MS
| considers selling a PC with no operating system as encouraging
| piracy of Windows.
|
| So I suspect this option is either due to an agreement with MS,
| or an overly cautious legal department.
| shmerl wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Some countries also prohibit selling laptops without any OSs
| because they're unusable in that way, so this is a way to sell
| a technically "fully usable laptop" for people who'll install
| linux anyway.
| detaro wrote:
| which leaves the question of why going through the hassle of
| creating this mess instead of just Linux.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Because they they have to support that linux distro, with
| all the drivers, update etc.,...
|
| And the FreeDOS just works. Doesn't do much, but what it
| does, it does well.
| detaro wrote:
| but the Linux they are shipping underneath that FreeDOS
| _also_ works. And they also offer Linux preinstalled, so
| they need to "support" that to whatever amount anyways.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| But customers can also order this laptop with Ubuntu
| preinstalled. Why offer both Ubuntu _and_ FreeDOS, especially
| if the latter is just running inside of a Linux VM anyway?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| When I last ordered from HP, many laptops did not have Linux
| as an option (mine did not, so I bought the FreeDOS version)
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| You're probably thinking about the agreement MS had with PC
| manufacturers that required them to pay for a copy of DOS
| regardless of whether the computer they sold had a copy of DOS
| or not. MS was barred from using that method in 1994.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/atr/competitive-impact-statement-us-...
| grishka wrote:
| Some countries have consumer protection laws that require that
| a factory-assembled computer must come with an OS. This whole
| FreeDOS thing feels like malicious compliance to me just to
| have _something_ so it doesn 't boot into a BIOS error.
|
| Though I've assumed that FreeDOS runs on bare metal. This whole
| Linux-with-a-VM feels strange, to say the least.
| userbinator wrote:
| That was far more amusing and interesting than I thought it would
| be...
|
| I wonder if it can actually boot DOS on the physical hardware,
| and if it can't ( DOS itself is very minimal in what it requires
| of the hardware), is it really PC-compatible anymore?
| yuhong wrote:
| Intel phased out the UEFI CSM from new platforms in 2020-2021.
| userbinator wrote:
| I suppose you could use GRUB and whatever Coreboot has as its
| BIOS? Either way, sad times indeed when PCs aren't anymore.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| seabios is the project you're looking for, and yes now I
| want to go see if it supports being booted from GRUB:)
|
| 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)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| The Clover bootloader designed for Hackintosh is able to boot
| UEFI operating systems (including non-Apple ones) on
| computers that don't natively support UEFI. Is there any
| reason a different bootloader couldn't do the reverse?
| walrus01 wrote:
| It's like a Linux, qemu, DOS turducken
| ObscureScience wrote:
| Wow.
|
| But it's also quite surprising considering HP (and HPE which I
| understand is not very related) usually provides FreeDOS based
| firmware update and configurarion ISOs on their product download
| pages.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Very interesting. I'm assuming there is no persistence in the
| referenced live squashfs ?
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