On Tue, 8 Aug 2000, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

>> being new to PPC I must admit that I was slightly
>> astonished to see that by default the C data type
>> "char" is equivalent to "unsigned char".
>
>Well, in ISO C, a char may be either signed or
>unsigned.
>
>> this is not only true for the gcc "specs" in
>> netbsd-macppc, but moreover the "-fsigned-char"
>> flag appears not to be used in the kernel builds.
>
>This is quite strange. I've been on the RiscBSD
>mailing-list (this is NetBSD/arm32) and it was
>said that NetBSD required *signed* char (I don't
>remember at which level), and this was annoying
>because the ARM processors don't have a signed
>byte-load or it is slower than the unsigned one.

This is interesting as my limited knowledge goes about
processors.  But LinuxPPC feels extremely fast at the console.
NetBSD didn't seem all to fast, nor did MacOS X Server.  MacOS
X Server of course had great video support, but of course that
would be obvious since Apple did the video drivers, meanwhile
X in either or Linux or BSD on Mac hardware is intolerably slow.

Heard John Carmack was working on X for Darwin, but the pessimistic
side of me, tells me this is a lost cause, as it should be for
LinuxPPC or more defined OS's available.

I have to ask, is there a single OS that is fully optimized for
the PPC arch?  Or atleast as optimized as Windows is for x86,
its getting kinda frustrating, and LinuxPPC seems like the
only OS I have installed that really unleashed the speed so
diligently hidden in other OS's.  But the drivers for additional
hardware such as video totally sucks.

Sorry if this seems lame to some of you.

Jaron Omega

>
>Vincent Lefevre.