Re: Small MicroVAX IIs - what version? - was Re: NetBSD/vax current

[David Brownlee <abs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On 20 April 2014 08:44, Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 06:10:00PM -0400, Toby Thain wrote:
>> At the moment I don't have any fact or opinion to say that 1.5+ is not
>> going to work well on my MicroVAXes, I was just asking for information
>> from people who might have some.
>
> I don't have any MV myself, but I tested it in SIMH when fixing bootblocks
> some time ago (as well as an emulated 780).
>
> A 5.2 release on an emulated MicroVAX 3900 takes ~6 seconds between
> pressing enter after the login name untill the password: prompt
> appears for the fist time. Later login attempts are faster (probably
> only as long as caches last.)
>
> Of course I have no idea how that correlates to real devices.
>
> David: this should be a good option for you to do the timings - as long as
> you keep the host system constant, statistics should be ok (relatively).

I had thought about using simh - timings from it would be much better
than no timings :), but it would be nice to give the absolute timings
on a real VAX (I think most people interested would find a uVAXII a
pretty ideal baseline), and there may be some artifacts (interrupt
latency, relative instruction speed for 64 bit multiply, or similar)
which only show up on real hardware.

Still, it would be much easier to repeat the tests across any
combination of os versions :)