Re: 80386 support

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 04:07:35AM -0400, Mouse wrote:
 > > As for supporting sun3, i386, etc - perhaps you have a wrong
 > > impression.  It was stated before that NetBSD is not a conservation
 > > project nor its primary goal is to run on the old computers
 > 
 > There was a time when NetBSD said "Of course it runs NetBSD." and meant
 > it.  It was an explicit goal of NetBSD to run on old computers, new
 > computers, esoteric computers, common computers - pretty much anything
 > with an MMU and at least 32 bits of width in its programmer model.

It still is, or did you miss the discussions about 36-bit machines a
while back?

The trouble, as has been pointed out to you before, is not (mostly)
NetBSD, but that the gcc development team does not share your
priorities. NetBSD as a project has little choice but to go along with
what the compiler projects are willing to provide. Sticking to gcc 2.7
forever is not realistically feasible. Forking gcc is not feasible.
Writing a new compiler is not feasible. NetBSD is not a compiler
group.

It is possible that clang might serve you better, although with one
thing and another I rather doubt it. pcc is probably a better choice,
but pcc needs (AFAICT) a good bit of work still to really be usable as
the system compiler.

If you really want to keep using very old machines, you will need to
deal with this problem eventually, either by writing a small compiler,
contributing to a suitable compiler project, or finding a sucker^W
minion^Wvolunteer to do it for you.

It remains to be shown that there's any significant problem other than
gcc. Ergo, forking the OS will not help much.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost