Subject: Re: how fast^H^H^H^Hslow?
To: Christophe Kalt <kalt@taranis.org>
From: Brian Willoughby <brianw@sounds.wa.com>
List: port-next68k
Date: 05/20/2002 16:14:19
Christophe Kalt asked:
> there's a NeXT sitting in a box in a dark corner near me, and
> i'm now wondering whether i should invest time to get NetBSD
> running on it.  Not clear what model it is, it says "NeXTstation
> Turbo" (turbo? woo hoo, sounds fancy;), Model No N1100.
>
> so, how slow are these beasts?

For Unixy things, these machines are quite fast.  NFS, NetInfo, sendmail and  
such are fine.  I do note that graphics can be slow, but I think NetBSD doesn't  
really support much in the way of graphics?

I'm running NEXTSTEP 3.3 on a Turbo NeXTdimension, and I read my mail via  
Mail.app on a daily basis.  It's fast enough to keep me from switching to  
something with fewer plug-ins available (like Mac OS X, which runs on my  
PowerMacs).

David Wetzel <dave@turbocat.de> replied:
[  A NeXT Turbo has an 68040 at 33 MHz and PS2 Ram. It is noticeable
[  faster than a non-turbo (25MHz).

What's "PS2 Ram"?  I do know that the Turbo NeXT added support for  
column-addressed RAM access, which speeds up page faulting or any other  
sequential memory access.

Like David, I have not set up a NeXT to run NetBSD yet.  I think the easiest  
way for me to do it is get a kernel image onto another machine served via tftp,  
and netboot one of my older NeXT's rather than install NetBSD on a hard disk.   
But, no time yet...

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting