To upgrade a 4000/200 to a faster cpu, you need to replace the entire
backplane, the /200 was the last machine in the 4000 series that was 'all
qbus'... the /300 and later were a new 'pele' bus for the cpu and memory and
qbus for the rest.  I have a 4000/700a, and its VERY fast...



Gunther Schadow wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I told you I got that VAX 4000-200 (not quite in my hands yet but
> soon.) But I really want to make it the fastest VAX around, i.e.
> that would be a -700 or something, right? Is such upgrade done
> simply by replacing the CPU blade? Or is there anything different
> about the Q-bus, PSU or whatnot?
>
> NetBSD's highest line of VAX is the -300 or -500, right? This is
> going to be my machine to build NetBSD kernels (I have basically
> given up on doing difficult development jobs on the VAX6000s. They're
> too slow. I have been trying three times to build GCC-2.98 and it
> failed every time. It's actually not so slow if you can do a parallel
> make, however, with GNU make and the -j option things get confused
> when bulding GCC. I think GNU make doesn't do a good job of keeping
> track of the dependencies between the parallel jobs, or, may be,
> the way the GCC makefiles are written they might escape GNU make's
> ernest attempt in synchronizing the parallel jobs.
>
> BTW: I remember Jason Thorpe said at BSDcon 2002 that NetBSD
> would soon be using GCC-3.0's full featured cross-platform
> compiling capabilities. Is that done already? I gues the best
> way for quick kernel build and debug turnaround would be doing
> it on my Laptop, which is by far my fastest machine.
>
> thanks,
> -Gunther
>
> --
> Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D.                    gschadow@regenstrief.org
> Medical Information Scientist      Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
> Adjunct Assistant Professor        Indiana University School of Medicine
> tel:1(317)630-7960                         http://aurora.regenstrief.org