On Tue(09)/Aug/05 - , Jim Wise wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Aug 2005, Liam J. Foy wrote:
> 
> >> Heh -- one of those changes which only starts to be relevant with newer, 
> >> faster machines, I guess.  Historically, of course, it has not been 
> >> possible to get from boot to launch of inetd (and by extension 
> >> in.rstatd) in less than one minute. :-)
> >
> >Printing seconds is much better than printing absolutely nothing if the
> >machine is up. My 350mhz machine can boot up in less than a minute. It's
> >not a fast machine =).
> 
> I wasn't questioning the utility of the change, merely noting with some 
> amusement the recency of it's usefulness.  :-)

I see. Well for a two line addition, it also makes it follow some
consistency in BSD too. FreeBSD and DragonFly will return seconds too if
uptime is < 1 min =)

> 
> In the universe of machines NetBSD runs on, 350mhz is, in fact a fast 
> machine.  That said, neither of my main NetBSD systems, one 733 MHz and 
> the other 333 MHz, boot in anywhere near that short a time.  :-)

This is the reason why I am now also working on providing the NetBSD
community with Binary Updates. I have been working on them for about 2
weeks, using Colin Percivals work on freebsd-update. They will not be
fully automated just yet as Colin has them working for FreeBSD
currently.

I noticed many people are using slow hardware on NetBSD and compiling a
fresh kernel after a security patch can take time. However with Binary
patches this will be _MUCH_ quicker.

Within the next month I should have some good working patches. Colin has
been assisting me with my series of questions, so things are moving
along. I plan to provide 2.0 with the security patches first, then
consider older NetBSD releases in the future (however they will only be
available for the GENERIC kernel, like FreeBSD, due too hundreds of
possible kernel configurations). That's not to say in the future we can't
support the other default configs provided with NetBSD.

Once I have a some working process of making the patches here, I'll then
be limited by diskspace and resources. This is where the community could
possibly muck in! (hubert and me estimate about 100gb for everything,
possibly less). I'll probably also need some people to help me in the
creation of the binary patches when there are times when I can't. 

I'll keep you informed as time goes on. I would like to purchase
netbsdupdates.org in the future too ;-). /me pokes the rich people.

-- 
		- Liam J. Foy
		liamfoy@sepulcrum.org