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Re: NetBSD/vax current



On 2014-04-13 21:32, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 04/13/2014 03:21 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Just a "thanks" to all the people, who still keep this port working.
I actually managed it to build a KERNEL & DISTRIBUTION
on a VAX.

Thanks again!

    Seconded.  I'm not doing much with it just lately, but I did a few
months ago, and then things got busy with work.  I've gotten a gaggle of
new VAXen here (including a pair of VAX-11/785s!) and plan to do much
NetBSD/vax hacking in the not too distant future.

    Let's keep this port alive!

You are going to be soooo disappointed. Trying to just build a kernel on
the 11/785 will take an estimated two weeks. Really.
It's not really doable on the 8650 any more either. :-(

   Perhaps I should've been more specific.  I plan to run VMS on the
11/785s.  I have a few 4000/90s and other later machines for NetBSD.

Ah. Now, that makes more sense. VMS will move pretty nicely on those machines.

By the way, my comments about my 3500 a couple of weeks ago... After
firing up my 4000/90, I'm now thinking that it's partly a problem that
16M of memory just is way too little to run NetBSD as well.

   That figures.

   NetBSD really has turned into a bloated pig over the past decade or
so.  Maybe even a little earlier than that.

Yeah. :-(
I'm going to try and do some more testing, but I really can't see many other explanations. I noticed that just booting NetBSD up on the 4000/90 grabbed more than 16M before the boot was complete, so with only 16M it is going to be paging a lot.

However, running on a simulated 8650 at least seems to have revealed
some kind of issue if you were to have more than 64M in one 86x0.
Unfortunately, I don't have quite that much in the real machine, so I
can't verify this on real hardware, but using simh, VMS works fine with
512M while NetBSD goes wrong somewhere when you have more than 64M.
Since NetBSD works ok on my 4000/90 with more memory, it must be
something related to things early in the boot process, me thinks. I'm
going to look at it soon, unless someone beats me to it.

I also have a bunch of uncommitted 86x0 stuff that I should try to send in.

   Well, get to it, man! ;)  I expect there will eventually be a fork of
NetBSD that will trim the fat and make it more usable.  Testing on
older, slower hardware would go a long way toward "keeping it honest".

Question is if anyone have the time, energy and money for that to happen?

        Johnny

--
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt%softjar.se@localhost             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol


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