> This brings up something that has been bugging me for a while.  What exactly 
> is in the recent kernels that VAX people are trying to keep up with?  Asked 
> another way, what would the VAX world loose between NetBSD 1.5 & BSD 4.3 
> kernels?  How much user-land would one loose access to by having a leaner 
> kernel?

mmap(2) and nfs come to mind.  and therefore amd.

> Just a thought.  I know my 3100m40 is too slow to be much more than a 
> curiosity these days. 

it's likely not slow due to kernel feature level.  unless the largeness of
the kernel is causing user processes to page or swap or whatever.

> > As a demo of how light 4.3 is, the compiled kernel is around 150k
> > and it compiles in well under 30 minutes.... on an MVII 9 mb box,
> > with esdi drives, no less.....(:+}}...
> 
> Along the same lines, I recently picked up a Heurikon VME532 system (if 
> anyone knows anything about this beast, do let me know off list).  30MHz 
> NS32532, 4MB VRAM, 170MB ESDI disk.  It runs GNX 3.1, which was National 
> Semis Unix flavor, and the basic distribution + development system fits in 
> about 115MB.  The thing boots faster than any of my recent vintage BSD 
> machines, and is astonishingly responsive.  Remarkable. 

i still love my heath/zenith z100, too, but it won't hold my e-mail archives.