Re: Where do the mac68k packages on ftp.netbsd.org come from?

[David Riley <fraveydank%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Mar 27, 2013, at 3:39 PM, John Klos wrote:

> Crosscompiling is fine for certain things, but the idea of checking 10,000 
> packages to see what can and can't be crosscompiled is not something I ever 
> picture myself doing.

Forgot about that detail.  That would make it harder, yes.
I wonder if an emulated system wouldn't work faster... my
Core2 Macbook emulates a PDP/11-23 much faster than the real
thing runs, though a 68040 is obviously a different beast.
And I'm not familiar with the state of 68k emulation these
days; I know Apple's emulation was quite good, even for the
early PPCs, but it was also a lot closer to the metal.

>> Disk access time may be a big factor in that, though, in which
>> case a nice fast NFS server might actually improve things quite a
>> bit.
> 
> In the mac68k world, though, nfs is over 10 Mbps ethernet, so this isn't 
> always the case. If I get a bunch of Q605 motherboards set up together, 
> though, nfs certainly would be easier.

Easier, definitely.  The big problem I'm seeing with my PPCs
is latency, though; I don't get anything more than about 1
MB/s (that's megabytes per second) for the most part,
according to iostat.  That's on a 10 MHz SCSI bus with what
was a fairly fast 9 GB drive for its time.  I haven't had a
chance to see what kind of speeds I can get talking to my
Linux machine over NFS, but I'm willing to believe I can
get more throughput simply because of the lower latency,
even over 10Mbps (1.25 MBps).

>> That said, one of my pet "back burner" projects is to make a cheap
>> rackmount case for LC motherboards (all the "pizza-box" style ones
>> have the same basic outline, so it should work for all of them),
>> since they make OK DNS/mail servers.  If anyone knows a good way
>> to do that, let me know (Protocase is nice for a lot of projects,
>> but sadly not this one because it's not super-cheap and doesn't
>> do bends the way I'd need).  I know someone did something similar
>> for original iMac motherboards a long time ago (Marathon Computing
>> or something similar?).
> 
> I've done a couple of 1U Quadra 605s and first generation G3 iMacs. I'll have 
> to find those pictures.

I'd love to see that!  The Q605 had the same motherboard as
the LC475, so whatever box you used would happily house an
LCII/LCIII as well (or an LC, but you can't run NetBSD on
that because it's an '020).

> Quadra 610 machines would probably be 2U, wouldn't they? Or would you assume 
> that they'd be used without any expansion cards? Either way, I'll be 
> interested to see what you design.

Maybe?  I wasn't planning on a 610, since I don't have one
(I wish I knew what happened to the body of my father's old
dead 660av; I have the CPU in my LC475, but I could probably
fix the 660av).  I would assume that the 610 motherboard
doesn't even come close to fitting into an LC chassis, but
it's been a long time since I've looked at one.

It's a project that's far into the future, because I have a
much more interesting PDP/11 project occupying my rather
limited spare time, followed by a high-quality vintage-
friendly video digitization/conversion project (ever tried
to plug an Apple II into a new LCD TV?  Even when it does
work, it's not pretty).  Maybe some day, when I'm flush with
cash and time...


- Dave