Re: NetBSD/vax - worth continuing?

[Aaron Jackson <aaron%aaronsplace.co.uk@localhost>]

Hi Johnny,

I have noticed and appreciate your contributions to the vax port. As I
am only playing with VAXen as a hobby, I've never submitted bug
reports. I haven't tried every version of NetBSD/vax, but the one I have
found to be most stable is 1.5, which is of course very old and from the
year 2000.

While it would be fun to be able to run the latest version of NetBSD, I
wouldn't want to encourage anyone to spend their time on an such an
outdated platform.

Just my thoughts, hope they don't influence your decision too much in
either direction.

Thanks,

Aaron.


Johnny Billquist writes:

> 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.
>
> 	Johnny