Re: 80386 support

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

This is rapdily reaching the point where it no longer has anything to
do with 80386 support, nor even the i386 port.  Perhaps we should move
it elsewhere?

>> [...] I have an hp300 with a grand total of five megabytes of RAM.
> Could you cross-build it from a more modern machine?

Possibly...if any of the easily-cross-buildable versions cross-build to
anything small enough to run on it at all.  The last thing I've even
tried to run on it is pre-2.0; it's been a long time since I tried, in
large part because I had trouble and came to the conclusion that I had
a fried output pin on the HP-IB interface.  I need to test more and
maybe do some hardware work....

>> There's another machine I have which is in a similar situation with
>> disk space.  As far as I know, no interface hardware exists at all
>> (much less is commonly available, even as comared to the machine
>> itself) to allow it to use even IDE, much less SATA, disks...
> I have a Javastation Krupps that has no disk interface.

Ouch, that's even rougher.

> I've toyed with the idea of turning it into a diskless X terminal or
> even just a simple music player.  I will need to learn how to set up
> a server for it to netboot from.

This machine I once ran under 1.4T, with local disk, back when I had
enough working disk for it to make that feasible; I've also tried
running it diskless.  Diskless was slower by a factor of three to four,
as I recall (it was a fairly long time ago, so I don't entirely trust
that memory), at least for the workload I was using, which was a build
of the world.  When running diskless it would crash often enough I was
unable to get a complete build of the world; I haven't investigated
enough to know whether the hardware developed a subtle flaw or there's
a bug somewhere that's tickled by running it diskless.  Some one of
these years I want to dust that machine off and get it back in
operation; I've got fond memories of using them back in the '80s.

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