reply to amiga-dev only please.

Markus Wild spoketh:
>Well, although this might sound evil, I'd like to make the serious
>vote: *don't* go 64bit! This is one of the (few) pets taken over from
>4.4 that *I* don't want in NetBSD. Now, what are we going to do? I simply
>don't think voluntarily introducing a MAJOR compatibility drawback to
>older software (on both the source and binary levels) is a bad thing, more
>so since this introduction doesn't give us anything new in exchange. Why
>should anyone need 64bit file sizes on a system like the amiga? Why do
>you want quad-arithmetic all over the place, for nothing? This is not
>really meant to be a flame, but it probably is..  (BTW: just because it's
>in 4.4 is no reason for me to not question it...)

As an option, this is fine, as a default, I don't think that would be a good  
idea.  Growing the kernel size, plus making it slower, is not that good of a  
"benefit".  Since a lot of the machines that we want to eventually support do  
not have an FPU, this would make it viciously slower (it's bad enough that  
the current binaries are compiled for the FPU (to the best of my knowledge),  
which I think shouldn't be since they are the default binaries, but that's my  
own nit).  Basically, I want to keep the general attitude of "you do with  
your own kernel and binaries what you want", but for the default stuff, it  
should be small, fast, and not require a lot to get it going.  Does this seem  
too dictatorial?




--
 William J. Coldwell - billc@iceCuBE.cryogenic.com - Cryogenic Software

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