> 
> 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?  Other than MI SCSI drivers, there isn't a lot of commonality with 
> other archs, is there? 
> 
If you compile a tailored NetBSD kernel for a VAX it will not be so much
bigger than a 4.3 kernel, and it will consume much less memory when you
are running than 4.3. You get a bunch of benefits, like an effective VM
system, much faster network I/O and so.

The size of a 11/750 kernel for massbuss disks, ethernet and dz11:
# size netbsd 
text    data    bss     dec     hex     filename
420884  15876   125064  561824  892a0   netbsd

The same but also with massbuss tapes and interlan ethernet from 4.3BSD:
# size vmunix
text    data    bss     dec     hex     filename
322372  99224   112044  533640  82488   vmunix

(note that text+data is almost the same size on both of them).

-- Ragge