Re: /etc/disktab on vax

[Anders Magnusson <ragge%ludd.ltu.se@localhost>]

On 07/02/2012 01:01 AM, Dave McGuire wrote:
>    The difference is important, though: That consumer-grade six-core i7
> machine will most definitely not be functional in twenty years, while I
> know of quite a few VAX-11/750s (~30 years old) that are still running
> just fine.  That was one of NetBSD's earliest supported systems, and the
> VERY first one, I believe, (Ragge?) for NetBSD/vax.
True.  I had two of them, one running 4.3 Reno and compiling the system 
and the other for test booting, using a dual-ported RP06 :-)
>    Let us not be too quick to de-support for the sake of de-supporting.
> The maintenance and testing overhead is minimal.  The latter can be ZERO
> if we put it on the users of, say, VAX-11/750s, to do the testing on
> those machines and report bugs, preferably with patches. (I will, once I
> get my 11/750 reassembled)
There are a bunch of things that causes bloat but lacking them makes 
systems almost unusable. Compiling things on 4.3BSD systems is really a 
pain since most SW today expect things like language support, threads, 
tons of new libc routines etc.

There are also the fact that people writing modern SW often do not care 
about execution speed, since it anyway is fast enough on modern hardware.

-- Ragge