On Wed, 3 Nov 1999, Greg Ingram wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Nov 1999 marcio.pocciotti@db.com wrote:

> > Is there a port for NetBSD/VAX for SETI@home?
> > I have three VAXen I want to setup to run SETI with NetBSD/VAX 1.4.
> 
> No, and apparently none is forthcoming.  Seems the VAX doesn't do IEEE
> floating point.

All the feedback I've seen on it indicates that there are two major
stumbling blocks to the NetBSD/vax port of the Seti@Home client. I also
followed some threads on this in comp.os.vms where the OpenVMS people were
pushing for a VAX OpenVMS client.

[1] As mentioned above, No IEEE floating point.   This is not to say that
    we couldn't implement an IEEE emulation library.  Since we do already
    have an FPU, I'd guess that we might be able to lean a bit on the
    existing floating point instructions instead of implementing the IEEE
    support strictly in integer math.

[2] Most of the VAXen are too slow turn around a completed Seti@Home run
    before their server thinks the run is stale and resends it to
    someone else.

The first item is a geniune concern, we'd need to have good IEEE FP
support before we could expect Seti@Home to port a client to NetBSD/vax.
The second item isn't a real problem, it's just a matter of changing mids
of people at Seti@Home as to what's an acceptable turn around time.  :-)

-brian.
--- Brian Chase | bdc@world.std.com | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ -----
You can re-create the executable from the source, but re-creating the
source from the executable is like trying to make a pig out of sausage.
 -- An old C programmer's adage.