Re: Keeping up to date with -current with a cross-compiler

[Michael <macallan1888%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hello,

On Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:51:26 -0500
David Riley <fraveydank%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:

> On Dec 12, 2011, at 6:46 PM, John Klos wrote:
> 
> >> I definitely did this successfully a few months ago, but the knowledge 
> >> seems to have leaked out of my brain since then.  I'm crosscompiling 
> >> -current on OS X (because I can actually do the CVS update and build the 
> >> entire distribution in less time than the 9500 takes to do the CVS update).
> > 
> > Damn... that's either a fast OS X machine or a slow 9500...
> 
> I've noticed that the 9500 is pretty slow on modern NetBSD, especially 
> compared to the speed I remember from the 1.6 days.  I don't remember if 
> that's nostalgia covering my memory or not, but disk I/O seems particularly 
> slow (I'm using MESH).  I'd run a profiling build, but that seems to have 
> trouble with build.sh (and the patch I saw online a year or so ago to add 
> that to build.sh never seems to have made it into the mainline).

Are you by any chance using the same old kernel config from 1.6? Mesh had a bug 
that prevented synchronous transfers which I fixed somewhere around 2.0, older 
configs will disable sync negotiation - if your config is old the disable sync 
bits probably never got removed.
Then, old SCSI disks are rather slow compared to anything halfway modern - 
nothing prevents you from putting a cheap SATA card and a modern disk into the 
9500, I have this in my G4:
viaide0 at pci2 dev 3 function 0: VIA Technologies VT6421 Serial ATA RAID 
Controller (rev. 0x50)
viaide0: bus-master DMA support present
viaide0: using irq 53 for native-PCI interrupt
atabus2 at viaide0 channel 0
atabus3 at viaide0 channel 1
atabus4 at viaide0 channel 2
... hooked up to two 160GB disks I had sitting around so the whole thing cost 
me about $25
The RAID bit is BIOS only anyway so it's safely ignored.
All you'd need an old SCSI disk for is to load a kernel and maybe hold a rescue 
system. Sure, you can find UW-SCSI or ATA cards with Apple firmware which would 
be directly bootable but these would likely be expensive, difficult to find, 
for the questionable benefit of one less disk ( which you could scsictl stop 
right after booting in order to get rid of noise & heat output ) 

> It's also a fairly speedy OS X machine. :-)  You can put a lot of compute 
> power into an iMac these days...

I used to build releases on a dual 2GHz G5 running 10.5 - it barely managed to 
beat a dual 500MHz G4 running NetBSD thanks to OSX's slow-as-hell fork() ( and 
probably NetBSD being much faster creating and deleting lots and lots of small 
files )

have fun
Michael