Re: NetBSD/vax - worth continuing?

[Johnny Billquist <bqt%softjar.se@localhost>]

Hi.

On 2016-09-20 18:32, Guy Broome wrote:
> Johnny:
>
> I've just started using NetBSD/vax recently on an MV3100/10e, purely as
> a tinkering project / a curiosity.  I'm doing a full diskless system, as
> working SCSI disks <1GiB in capacity are very tough to find these days.
> I'm working on the whole SCSI -> IDE -> CompactFlash setup, but don't
> have all of the pieces for it yet.

Uh. Why not just plug in a large disk? It will work fine.
All you need to remember is to keep the root partition less than 1G in 
size, and all will work just nice.

> Additionally, I actually ended up using OpenBSD's boot loader to load
> NetBSD, as the NetBSD ELF loader seems to send out to lunch every
> version of /mopd/ that I tried (yes, even versions of /mopd/ that
> ostensibly support ELF).

Yes. There have been various issues with mop booting.

> So far, the mish-mash of binary pkgsrc packages available for different
> NetBSD versions has been somewhat of a challenge, and the C compiler
> encounters internal compiler errors when trying to build for VAX
> natively, on all but the simplest programs.

Yes. Isn't it fun?

> Having said all of that, I couldn't really blame anybody for not wanting
> to maintain software for an all-but-obsolete architecture.  These things
> happen, and I certainly don't have the technical skill to keep the port
> going myself, no matter how nice it might be to have.

The problem is not the hardware, in my view. It's NetBSD, trying to be 
modern, just making it almost useless.

	Johnny

> --Guy Broome, Richmond, Va.
>
> On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 12:01 PM Anders Magnusson <ragge%ludd.ltu.se@localhost
> <mailto:ragge%ludd.ltu.se@localhost>> wrote:
>
>     Hi Johnny,
>
>     Den 2016-09-20 kl. 18:50, skrev Johnny Billquist:
>     > I've been fixing things in NetBSD/vax for a long time. On and off,
>     > admittedly, and mostly focused around the 86x0 support.
>     >
>     > But it seems as if this is not worth doing anymore. NetBSD/vax does
>     > not build natively, and have not done so for years. And noone seems to
>     > even notice.
>     >
>     > Running on a real 8650, a "cvs update" on /usr/src nowadays take days,
>     > and usually the machine hangs after about a day, because of some bugs
>     > in the system which just seem to stop all I/O activity.
>     >
>     > The latest attempt at checking things out last week, ended up with me
>     > actually crashing into ddb (I lost what the error was).
>     >
>     > It seems as if NetBSD/vax is actually dead. It just hasn't realized it
>     > yet.
>     >
>     > Just for a blast, I'm booting Ultrix on the 8650, to see what the
>     > difference in speed will feel like. But I think I'm going to stop
>     > trying to boot and run NetBSD on the 8650. I don't see the point
>     anymore.
>     >
>     > Is anyone actually trying to use NetBSD/vax at all? build.sh crashes
>     > as on the first C-file it tries to compile, at this point.
>     Well, I run it, on a 4000/90 :-)   But I do not build the system
>     natively, not enough disk and NFS takes forever.
>
>     It's known that there are problems with gcc, gnats gives some hints
>     about that.
>     Unfortunately I cannot spend time to jump into gcc for debugging also...
>
>     But, I do not have any hanging problems, must be something specific to
>     the 8600.  Have you checked where it actually hangs?
>
>     -- Ragge