RE: NetBSD/vax - worth continuing?

[Mark Pizzolato <Mark%infocomm.com@localhost>]

On Tuesday, September 20, 2016 at 2:00 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> On 2016-09-20 20:54, John Klos wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> >> 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.
> >
> > Oh, we notice. I've been trying to build packages (and fixing what I
> > can, and even reporting fixes upstream) using the toolchain from
> > NetBSD 6.1.5. It would be nice if someone who understood things could
> > get gcc in to a working state, or if someone would get support for VAX
> > in to clang / LLVM.
> 
> Anything would be an improvement at this point. Like I said. Trying to run
> build.sh on current bombs out right away, even in simh, so anyone can
> reproduce this within seconds on a booted system.
> 
> >> 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.
> >
> > I've never seen any of my systems hang. Regardless of toolchain
> > issues, the hardware has always been incredibly stable. Trying to
> > build certain packages can cause a panic, but even then I've never
> > seen a hang. Then again, all of my hardware are VAXstations (4000/30,
> > /60, /90), so perhaps some driver for hardware in your 8650 is problematic.
> 
> The hardware is fine. It runs VMS and Ultrix without issues. And with NetBSD,
> I have had it stall as well as panic.

He said "perhaps some driver for hardware", not the hardware itself.  The 
8650 shares no disk drivers with any of the systems John lists....  That you 
see this also with a simh system supports the theory that there is a driver 
problem....

- Mark