Re: Dead ports [Re: config(5) break down]

[David Young <dyoung%pobox.com@localhost>]

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 04:45:21PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 03:14:57PM -0500, David Young wrote:
> > 
> > Regardless of what we do or do not do with sun2 et cetera, TNF could buy
> > some ARM and MIPS boards for developers.  ARM and MIPS boards, however,
> > are not so precious as a sun2.  In fact, they're abundant, and cheap.
> > Nevertheless, there does not seem to be much interest in porting to
> > them.  Why is that?
> 
> Neither so abundant nor so cheap as you think, it seems to me, if you
> want something that's modern enough to really be useful and has a vendor
> friendly enough to make software development specifically for the platform
> an exercise anyone would want to do in his spare time...!

I guess that it depends on your application whether these boards are
"useful" or not, but these places sell inexpensive boards that have
more-or-less open architecture/documentation:

www.embeddedarm.com
www.openplug.org
www.routerboard.com
www.ubnt.com

In NetBSD, we have support for only a few of the boards at those links.
I don't think that it's because TNF does not buy developers the boards.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung%ojctech.com@localhost      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933