There are over ~3300 commits since the last preview release (pre8) and a very large chunks of dosemu2 architecture were written and stabilized. Hopefully it would be possible to do more frequent releases in the future and avoid such a long development cycles.
Note: because of the new architecture in place, we suggest to re-install dosemu completely. I.e. erase your /etc/dosemu ~/.dosemurc ~/.dosemu/.dosemurc and clean ~/.dosemu/drive_c from any system/boot files (or remove ~/.dosemu completely if there is nothing important within). Compatibility mode (to run old setups) is present but may require some manual adjustments. Also note that compatibility mode means a reduced feature set. If you insist on an old setup but dosemu2 doesn't pick it up properly, don't hesitate to ask for help on our github discussions page.
Summary of user-visible changes:
- fdpp is now our default OS. It is a 64bit DOS core that boots under dosemu2 and allows to work without installing any DOS. Of course you can still install any DOS if you want, but that will in most cases only cause the features reduction.
- comcom32 is our default shell. comcom32 is a command.com variant that runs in 32bit space. Eventually we aim for the 64bit shell, but so far we only have this. You can still use your favourite shell if you want.
- Worked out the security model. We hope that dosemu2 now provides a relatively secure sandbox environment, and yet exposes all the needed features. Exposing features in a secure manner (rather than to simply declare them insecure and disable) was a challenge.
- Added KVM-assisted acceleration to DPMI (@bartoldeman).
- Added TTF support (@andrewbird)
- Implemented region locking and share support in MFS. One of the most requested/missed feature of dosemu1 times.
- Implemented $_trace_mmio option (@dos4boss)
- Lots of speed-ups to simx86 (@bartoldeman)
- Lots of i18n work.
- musl support
- Added lots of CI tests (@andrewbird)