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

[Charles Dickman <chd%chdickman.com@localhost>]

Not a new subject, check this thread out from quite a while back.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.netbsd.ports.vax/2204/focus=2221

From: <Robertdkeys <at> aol.com>
Subject: Observations on NetBSD VAX on old machines.....
Newsgroups: gmane.os.netbsd.ports.vax
Date: 2003-03-09 04:50:15 GMT (11 years, 6 weeks, 1 day, 16 hours and
11 minutes ago)

On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 4:38 AM, David Brownlee <abs%netbsd.org@localhost> 
wrote:
> 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 :)