Subject: Re IBM Z50 and NetBSD 3.0
To: None <port-hpcmips@netbsd.org>
From: None <djb_netbsd@charter.net>
List: port-hpcmips
Date: 03/02/2006 07:41:11
Thanks for the input......

>How does X run on the Z50?

Works good - just not real fast.  If you are used to the latest PC drawing speed then the Z50 will seem much slower.  But, if you are used to (or remember) the older X-Terminal drawing speeds, then the Z50 drawing speed looks OK.

>What about Dillo?

Dillo works fine within it's limitations.  

>dillo sometimes exhibits a very strange problem, ...
>... it puts the Xserver into a curious state, where keyboard
>input is only processed when the mouse is moved.

That's an Xserver bug that seems to be fixed now.  I've never seen any problems like that with Dillo on the Z50.

>Links-gui ran very slow (took about 5 minutes to start up) ...

>links-gui is ok speed-wise, once it started. The problem is that
>it pre-renders the fonts using FPU instructions, which have to be
>emulated, so it creates (iirc) around 130,000 CPU traps per second!

Links-GUI calculates gamma values for all of it's 192,000 color table entries using floating point math.  OUCH!  I modified the version on my site to use some fixed point integer calculations to speed things up.  It still takes about a minute to start up though.  I don't know about the font table -- I didn't get that far looking at Links-GUI.  Try my Links-GUI version and tell me what you think.

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Firefox/Minimo just finished compiling.  Now to see if it works.

djb