> > It's being actively worked on, the preliminary code may be available
> > soonish, but this is up to the person who's writing it (i.e. no
> > sense in asking yet..)
> 
> Not to be impolite, but that's the same thing everyone was told over 2
> years ago. About once every six months, a short thread starts up on
> tech-smp where some people say something like "Okay, it's time to
> actually do something about this. What if we simplify our goals?" or
> something like that. After that there's a flurry of messages from a few
> people with ideas, and other people volunteering to help if they're
> given direction from someone more in the know (I've been in the latter
> category), followed by a deafening silence. Any project that takes this
> long to complete could *surely* be helped by more people, yet we never
> (at least I never) see any requests for assistance. I'd be willing to do
> any sort of work on this, from writing documentation and testing stuff
> all the way to writing bits of code or auditing existing code to check
> for MP-safeness, but my inquiries have fallen on deaf ears (and another
> 6 months has passed). Have I been listening in the wrong place, or is
> this development going on "in secret" for some reason? If the latter,
> why is that, when there is a large community of people just dying to
> help?
> 

In the past I often observed that NetBSD implementations suffer from
huge delays because of 'wanting to do it right'. The bad side of that is
what you just mentioned. The good side is that NetBSD does seem to have
some goals, one of which is to make code as clean and portable as
possible, which has the nice result that I do not have a piece of
hardware here that it does not boot on (and I do have a bunch of
outlandish hardwarem including things like an acorn archimedes, a dec
vax etc)

I think you should look at what you have and what works best on it... or
the other way around, use an operating system on the hardware it
supports... waiting till its gonna support your hardware is gonna be
frustrating unless you are gonna write the support yourself. This is not
to blame the netbsd team for being frustrating, this is the case in
about any such projject I ever saw.


-- 
Bart van Leeuwen
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 mailto:bart@ixori.demon.nl  -  http://www.ixori.demon.nl/
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