Subject: Need VAX assembly info (was: what to do with an idle VAX...)
To: None <port-vax@netbsd.org>
From: John <john@sixgirls.org>
List: port-vax
Date: 06/19/2001 13:00:00
> What other sorts of uses could we drum up for olden VAXentoyz?

Mine is running Apache, sendmail, and procmail (acting as a backup mail
server for my colocated server), BIND doing secondary DNS, and so forth.
I've also installed the FreeCiv server on it for my FreeCiv playing users.

The desire for a dnet client comes from the fact that even when my
colocated Amiga server is heavily used (15 users at a time, 1+ gig of web
traffic per day, lots of anonymous ftp, users using napster...), the dnet
client still runs at 5/6 of the speed of an idle machine.

THe VAX, even if I load it up with work, will STILL be idle more than 50%
of the time.

I've looked over all of the projects on mersienne.org, and most offer
Windows only clients, Linux binaries (therefore, x86), or some
combination. They seem to think they're appealing to non-mainstream by
offering Mac clients.

There was a thread on this list a while ago about dnet clients for VAX; I
am interested in looking at writing the assembly part of the client for
VAX processors, and maybe with the help of John Girvin (the one who did
the optimised m68k dnet clients and Ignatios (who also did some optimised
clients), a reasonably fast client might be built.

Just for notes, a 40 MHz 68040 does an average sized OGR node in about
four days. Many VAX will probably take a week or two to do one node, but
the check-in time for distributed.net will allow this.

So who has some good links and info on VAX assembly?

Thanks,
John Klos