On Sat, 14 Mar 1998, Marc Theisen wrote:

> Hi BSD-Freaks!
> 
> I am now "using" RiscBSD 1.2-Beta for one year and there were no
> severe problems with it. Lately I "heard" about the fact there being
> a new 1.3-Alpha version of it. Now some few questions...

Ok Well there has now been a full 1.3 release. Anyone how has checked the
NetBSD ftp site recently will have noticed the 1.3.1 source diffs so there
will be a NetBSD/arm32 1.3.1 release soon. (Currently I am testing it).

> 1. X-performance
> 
> The Xarm-Server in 1.2-Beta (Version 27, I think) was a bit flaky
> when dragging windows around, hast this been improved?

X-arm33 is the latest one that I am using. I find it to be considerably
more stable than the older versions.

> 2. I/O-performance
> 
> Has the speed of disk-transfer been improved? Under RISC-OS 3.7
> my Quantum 2.1 GB reaches 2MB/sec, but under BSD only about 650 KB/sec.

Hmm have not tried onboard IDE for a long time now ;-) Its performance
should be a bit better than that. Higher speeds can be achieved on podule
based IDE cards as they have faster buss access times.

> 2. What about shared libraries?
> 
> Are the binaries still in the size range of some Megabytes, even
> simple commands like cp, top, ...?

Shared libraries were introduced with 1.2G around JUly / August last year.
This is drastically reduced the size of most binaries in particular the X
binaries. Binaries in /bin and /sbin and several others like tar are still
statically linked so that they can be used from single user mode etc.

> 3. StrongARM-Support
> 
> What about the frequent cache-flushings every few seconds? Has the
> kernel been adapted to StrongARM?

Work has been done to improve the StrongARM support in NetBSD. I think
these days most people are running on StrongARMs. There are still some
issue to be sorted to improve things further and they are being worked on.

> 4. New ported software (Java, TeX)
> 
> Are there new software products included in the new version worth
> downloading?
There are a number of new packages and a lot of updates to existing ones.
Another change to NetBSD has been the introduction of the FreeBSD pkg
system. This means that there are a lot of packages that can now be easily
build for NetBSD. I plan on putting quite a few of these online with the
1.3.1 release.
> 
> Ok, I would be happy if anyone could give me some advice wether
> upgrading to 1.3-alpha makes sense for me.
I would suggest going with a 1.3.1 release.

> By the way, my access to ftp.uni-stuttgart.de is quite good, so
> downloading takes just some minutes!

However if you have a high speed link then you may not want to wait in
while 1.3 alpha is a well tested release from which a 1.3.1 upgrade should
be easy to do.

Cheers,
				Mark