Hi,
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.
Oh, we notice. I've been trying to build packages (and fixing what I can, and even reporting fixes upstream) using the toolchain from NetBSD 6.1.5. It would be nice if someone who understood things could get gcc in to a working state, or if someone would get support for VAX in to clang / LLVM.
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.
I've never seen any of my systems hang. Regardless of toolchain issues, the hardware has always been incredibly stable. Trying to build certain packages can cause a panic, but even then I've never seen a hang. Then again, all of my hardware are VAXstations (4000/30, /60, /90), so perhaps some driver for hardware in your 8650 is problematic.
The latest attempt at checking things out last week, ended up with me actually crashing into ddb (I lost what the error was).
Wait - there's a DDB for VAX?
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.
NetBSD 6 is fine. Anything newer has the newer toolchain, and that doesn't work at all. If we get to NetBSD 8 without a fix for VAX, then it will be almost dead (or binary-only) because of that damned toolchain. I wish I knew more about toolchains.
John