Re: mutexes, locks and so on...

[Matt Thomas <matt%3am-software.com@localhost>]

On Nov 12, 2010, at 7:08 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:

> On 11/12/10 15:56, Andrew Doran wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 09:50:52AM -0500, der Mouse wrote:
>>>>> Over 15 years ago NetBSD had a possibility to take everyone into
>>>>> account [...]
>>>> So what you are arguing is that MI needn't be so much MI anymore, and
>>>> that supporting anything more than mainstream today is more to be
>>>> considered a lucky accident than a desired goal?
>>> 
>>> Looks to me like pretty much exactly what pooka was saying.
>>> 
>>>> Oh well!  I guess I should go away now.
>>> 
>>> And me, and everyone else running anything but x86_64 (and, maybe,
>>> i386; I don't know whether that's sufficiently modern to count).
>>> 
>>> Compilers that page themselves to death unless given over twice the RAM
>>> a uV2 maxes out at.  Decisions driven by "a megabyte of disk costs
>>> what, $0.00008?".  Now this.
>>> 
>>> bqt, wanna start a fork?  Looks as though NetBSD no longer supports
>>> most of the architectures it used to.
>> 
>> That idea could have merit.
> 
> What? That NetBSD no longer supports most of the architectures it used to?
> 
> Maybe it's time to change the "of course it runs NetBSD" to "is it an x86? 
> Then it also runs NetBSD in addition to Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, not to 
> forget Solaris and Windows".

NetBSD supports non-x86 pretty well.  You can't say that ARM, MIPS, or
PowerPC are x86 clones.

Old slow machines have their uses in NetBSD and among them are finding
unscaleable algorithms.  Speed can hide a multitude of sins and one of
the easiest way to expose is to see how NetBSD runs on a slow machine.

The older machines also help us to think outside of our comfort zone
and that is useful.

Even if it might appear so, there has been no decision to drop older
platforms so everyone calm down and take a breath.