On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, Andy Ball wrote:

> Here's something I'd wondered about Crusoe chips in NetBSD machines:
> The little I read about them during their development suggested that
> there was to be a layer of emulation software that compensated for
> differences between Crusoe's core and a conventional x86 chip.

It's more like firmware than software. Well, heck, more like hardware
than firmware. We detect that it's a Crusoe chip and all, but we don't
treat it differently than any other i386 chip. And there's no way to
get access to the "native" core.

>   CS> ...1280x600 display...
>
> That's HUGE! (I've been looking for something with 640x240 ;-)

Yes. It's the biggest display available on any sub-notebook, and
one of the reasons it's so usable. (You can find plenty of laptops
with bigger displays, but they all weigh three or four times as
much.)

> Probably get even more from something with an ARM or perhaps StrongARM
> microprocessor.  It wouldn't have the same performance, but would be
> adequate for my needs.  Of course I'm comparing apples with oranges:
> notebooks with palmtops. I don't think anyone makes the machine I want
> though :-/

Well, I came this -><- close to buying a palmtop instead of this
subnote, since there are plenty of nice little MIPS machines that
run NetBSD to chose from here in Japan. However, they are not much
less expensive and are much more limited in their capabilities
(slower, less memory, can't run i386 binaries like Netscape, etc.)
Also, their keyboards are all too small to touch-type on.

If you need something for serious work, you want a "real" laptop,
not a palmtop. (Again, note that the L2 is the very smallest machine
I consider suitable for serious work, though if you can live with a
smaller keyboard there are slightly smaller ones out there. None has as
big a display, though.)

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.netbsd.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC