--- Richard Rauch <rkr@olib.org> wrote:
> Re.
>
http://mail-index.NetBSD.org/netbsd-help/2004/01/08/0001.html
> 
> I'm not sure what you are asking.  BillOS does PPP
> and BillOS does
> SLIP.  

Ahh, pardon me. Brain fade. I've been on ethernet for
so long that I forgot about serial line antics. I only
ever set up a modem like once under *nix and I think I
did SLIP and PLIP once or twice to amuse myself. I
think Windows might even do PLIP with some coaxing.
Which might be better than SLIP on a guest OS? I have
a PLIP cable sitting here from the old PC anywhere
days... I think that's what they used? 

> Since my understanding of how bochs handles network
> interfaces would
> be pretty unreasonable to set up, I am probably
> wrong.  I just didn't
> see an alternative interpretation.  (^&  I certainly
> haven't *tried*
> it.

If Bochs CAN work similar to vm ware, then it's a very
slick setup that's worth using. I'll have to struggle
for a while and see what comes of it. If PLIP or SLIP
is easier, then maybe that's the way to go. It's going
to be slow though.

> As for usability, it's pretty limited even on a 2GHz
> AMD64 (AMD64 "3200").
> Though your impression seems to be much more
> favorable on the performance
> penalty.  I wonder if a dual CPU helps in some
> subtle way?  Or maybe
> you've turned up the optimization levels somehow?

Haven't played with optimization at all really. On the
NetBSD guest, I used the pit: enable=1 option so that
the keyboard worked. It responded like faster a 486 or
so, but this is a command line OS. It was usable in
command line mode, let's say. Grimdoze was S-L-O-W,
and of course the mouse didn't work... Which limits
it's useability greatly. Still have to try a newer
version of bochs to see if they worked on this.

> If you find out why plex86 was yanked from pkgsrc,
> I'd like to know.
> I commented on that, I think, in my original post.

There was that stabilization effort that happened not
too long ago, wonder if it was a casualty of that...
In any case, I may just compile it like in the old
days (sheesh how I love pkgsrc) and see what happens.

<tangent>
From what I'm seeing, bochs would fulfill one of the
project's claims which is if someone has some program
sitting there on an ancient 386 or 486 that's still in
production and everybody is scared to touch, it could
probably be emulated rather nicely on a modern *nix
machine. Especially if it doesn't rely on any
particular piece of hardware. And I know of these
situations. Probably thousands of "mom and pops" had
these *new fangled* computers installed years ago and
are still doing some job just fine. Until the machines
die, of course.

The only problem seems to be bochs's appetite for CPU
time, but CPU is cheap depending on who's asking who
and who's buying what.
</tangent>

Andy

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