Re: NetBSD/vax - worth continuing?

[Anders Magnusson <ragge%ludd.ltu.se@localhost>]

Hi Johnny,

Den 2016-09-20 kl. 18:50, skrev Johnny Billquist:
> I've been fixing things in NetBSD/vax for a long time. On and off, 
> admittedly, and mostly focused around the 86x0 support.
>
> But it seems as if this is not worth doing anymore. NetBSD/vax does 
> not build natively, and have not done so for years. And noone seems to 
> even notice.
>
> Running on a real 8650, a "cvs update" on /usr/src nowadays take days, 
> and usually the machine hangs after about a day, because of some bugs 
> in the system which just seem to stop all I/O activity.
>
> The latest attempt at checking things out last week, ended up with me 
> actually crashing into ddb (I lost what the error was).
>
> It seems as if NetBSD/vax is actually dead. It just hasn't realized it 
> yet.
>
> Just for a blast, I'm booting Ultrix on the 8650, to see what the 
> difference in speed will feel like. But I think I'm going to stop 
> trying to boot and run NetBSD on the 8650. I don't see the point anymore.
>
> Is anyone actually trying to use NetBSD/vax at all? build.sh crashes 
> as on the first C-file it tries to compile, at this point.
Well, I run it, on a 4000/90 :-)   But I do not build the system 
natively, not enough disk and NFS takes forever.

It's known that there are problems with gcc, gnats gives some hints 
about that.
Unfortunately I cannot spend time to jump into gcc for debugging also...

But, I do not have any hanging problems, must be something specific to 
the 8600.  Have you checked where it actually hangs?

-- Ragge