I'm rapidly becoming aware of one of the great problems of supporting the
VAX port of NetBSD.

The porting effort of NetBSD seems to be moving much faster than I can
compile the new code.  The speed of the port is faster than the speed of
my VAX. :-(    (Not that I hold that against my VAXen).

Potential solutions:

[1] Get NetBSD/vax running on faster machines (difficult: requires the
    expertise of a few individuals who know the VAX architectures well
    enough to write the necessary code.  Expensive time and
    resource-wise.  The pay-off is good only for those with access to
    the super-zippy machines).

[2] Get a cross compiler up and running for Intel boxes (not so hard?:
    Very yicky to have to soil the purity of VAX with Intel crutches, 
    but probably worth the effort.  Maybe it'd be a bit difficult to
    assemble the cross compile environment initially, but the benefit is 
    very good to everyone who's got access to Intel based machines).

[3] Compile sections of the source tree in parallel using multiple
    machines, each NFS mounting their `src' from a single directory.
    (easy: at least if I can ever get other NFS filesystems to mount under
    my root NFS diskless VS3100. No brainer here, but requires you to have
    access to multiple machines.  Super cheap solution but requires you to
    be sick in the head like myself -- causing you to accumulate several
    VAXen.  Probably not applicable to all but a few people.)


[2] seems like the most reasonable approach to help accelerate the
testing process of NetBSD-current as relates to the NetBSD/vax port. (But
I'll be working on [3] regardless :-).  The other ports all seem to have a
computational speed advantage over us for their development efforts.

Another benefit of making the compiles quicker would be to making the
process of putting together more frequent and more up to date snapshots
less painful.

-brian.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brian D. Chase         Systems Coordinator        brian.chase@carpediem.com
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