Hi,

> I was wondering about how package builds would be done. I just compiled
> standalone-tcsh on my SE/30 and it took around two to three hours. I
> started a kernel compile last night and it is still going almost ten
> hours later.

Yeah, the 68030 is a nice chip, but the 68060 is easily an order of
magnitude faster. It's even more superscalar (will dispatch more
instructions per MHz) than the Pentium Pro (II, III). The P4, btw, is even
less superscalar; they just wanted faster clock rates for marketing
purposes. The 68060 would've been a very nice chip had they ramped it up
to multi-hundred MHz.

> I was also wondering if it is possible to cross-compile packages for
> m68k? I have a a number of servers in my own rack here at home and I
> would like to help out with some of the open source projects around. I
> have a 1Mbit link to the internet so I thought maybe I would run a
> mirror or something but I'm still not sure what would be most helpful
> to the NetBSD project.

Well, cross compiling is difficult. It's possible with the NetBSD sources
because, well, we're NetBSD, and that's one of our goals. To try to get
everyone else out there to write clean enough code that we can cross
compile it reasonably is not very realistic - most of the code out there
is written assuming that every processor in the world is some i386
variant. A lot of that code won't compile without change on other
processors, hence the need for pkgsrc patches and stuff.

One way, although it's not really cross compiling (I suppose it could be
called that, but that'd be cheating) is to run a full m68k emulator on one
of your fast PCs. An example is Amithon, which is a heavily optimised
Amiga emulator. While Basilisk and other emulators use C code for the m68k
emulation, Amithon had lots of assembly to make it fast. Many people
running Amithon on 1.5 GHz and faster AMDs say that it's noticeably faster
than a 50 MHz 68060. So if one were to set up that with NetBSD and do bulk
package builds, that might be good.

> What sort of bandwidth is needed for your 1U Amiga?

Not much. I'd need a static IP (or at least one that doesn't change too
often), download bandwidth to fetch the sources for the packages (not too
much needed), and upload bandwidth to upload approximately 1.5 to 2 gigs
worth of packages every couple of months.

More than that, it should be in a real rack. It's on shelves with other PC
and PC-like cases, and it's not an ideal situation. It should just be more
permanent.

> Thanks for the info. That is quite interesting.

Sure, no problem. I'm writing an article about the building of the 1U
Amiga (it was a lot of work), and it will be in Total Amiga magazine. I'll
post the URL to the .pdf version when it's available. (Incidentally, I
host Total Amiga's web site on another Amiga server that I run:
http://www.totalamiga.org)

John Klos
Sixgirls Computing Labs