Re: Insights from successful, yet painful, install attempt.

[Roc Vallès <vallesroc%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hi,

On Sat, 9 Oct 2021 at 03:00, John Klos <john%ziaspace.com@localhost> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Is this what you're looking for?
>
> http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/distrib/amiga/miniroot/install.md?rev=1.33&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&only_with_tag=MAIN
>
Yes. It's a little more convoluted than I expected, so it'll take some
time to make sense of it.

> Since we're not trying to make miniroot.fs small enough to fit on a floppy
> disk, there really is no good reason to not have dhcpcd.

No dhcpcd, but also no ymodem (to move data via the serial w/o network
support). Saving a few hundred bytes isn't sensible vs usefulness.

> I think we need to revisit possible solutions for things like the initial
> makemandb or sshd run, like nicing and running in the background, and/or
> not running by default and printing a message on initial run if processor
> < m68040 or memory <= 16 megs, for example.

Running it niced for _everyone_ (not just Amiga users) doesn't sound
like a bad idea.

> There are some newer packages here, which is updated weekly:
> http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/amiga/9.0_2021Q3/All/
> Or here, which is updated several times a week:
> http://pkg.zia.io/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/m68k/9.0_2021Q3/All/

I'll try and figure out how to set a different repository. I suppose
it defaults to a "9.2" which is very outdated.

> netsurf, I think, requires gtk3, which we don't yet have, but is compiling
> now. We'll have to see if it completes on a system with 256 megs of
> memory.
>

Netsurf has gtk2 and gtk3 frontends AIUI. The gtk3 one is new. My
guess is that the port in pkgsrc likely tries to build both, and thus
the build depends on gtk3 too.

Trying to get gtk3 built looks like a good idea, before attempting else.

> We have ctwm, fvwm, icewm, matchbox, blackbox, for starters, in 2021Q3 :)
>
> I'm happy to take requests, because I have a couple of '040 machines that
> aren't yet running bulk builds directly.
>

i3 would be nice. If not possible, at least dwm.

> Speedwise, emulation isn't exactly ready yet, but there's lots of
> excellent work going on right now. Jake Hamby is working on an Amiga qemu
> target, there's Tetsuya Isaki's nono emulator, and Twitter user astr0baby
> has been posting about NetBSD/mac68k running in qemu incredibly quickly on
> an M1 Mac.
>

Interesting. I hadn't heard about any of these efforts.

> When emulation is ready, we'll certainly use it. Until then, I've just
> finished repairing an Amiga 3000 which has a 66 MHz m68060 in it which
> will be dedicatd to pkgsrc bulk package builds. Everything currently runs
> on a colocated 50 MHz m68060 which also does lots of other things, so
> having a dedicated machine will help lots. Also, since it will be able to
> share an NFS mount with several m68040 systems, automatic parallel
> building will be possible.

Is building with crossdev a possibility, with pkgsrc? It would take
care of both RAM and build speed issues.

As an aside, there's now an LLVM option (v13 with m68k support has
just been released). I suspect it'll take a while until it is usable
with netbsd.


Roc.