Re: Removing ARCNET stuffs

[Robert Swindells <rjs%fdy2.co.uk@localhost>]

David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:
>On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 08:06:56PM +0200, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo wrote:
> > Me, too.  What NetBSD offers, that no other O/S offers, is the support
> > for platforms that are no longer mainstream.  I've run it on Sparc and
> > VAX processors for years, and hope to continue playing with these old
> > machines.  I enjoy reading about others running NetBSD on even more
> > exotic platforms.  (Incidentally, and I run OmniNet (an ancient 2Mbps
> > token ring network) between machines in my home lab that are too old to
> > even run NetBSD.)
>
>I don't think (in general) that removing things is a good idea; but
>it's increasingly difficult to keep NetBSD running on ancient
>hardware. It's already infeasible to run the system compiler on most
>such machines; this is only going to get worse with time. Other bloat
>accumulates too, less rapidly perhaps but still so. The other day I
>observed in chat that Someone(TM) needs to sit down with a slow
>machine and a profiler for a while and find and kill all the
>gratuitous bubble sorts, linear searches, and other things that run
>too fast to be noticed on modern h/w; nobody disagreed, but on the
>other hand nobody's been rushing to do it either. And other things
>necessary for remaining relevant to semi-current hardware and usage,
>like keeping up with X, desktop, and virtualization things, are often
>in direct conflict with maintaining support for old hardware.

I tried booting -current on a mac68k earlier this week, it certainly
felt slower than I remembered.

[snip]

>Because of these trends, I've been thinking for a while now that maybe
>it's getting to be time to fork. That would allow having one project
>that intends to stay current, with all the attendant requirements,
>which probably mostly doesn't make sense on vintage hardware; and
>another project that explicitly abandons most or all of that and
>instead concentrates on being the best possible traditional multiuser
>or workstation Unix, which does make sense on vintage hardware that
>was designed for (or could be adapted to) those roles, and which also
>makes sense on newer hardware to the extent it's consistent with the
>traditional role.

I started using NetBSD because I wanted to use it on embedded
systems. Being able to use exactly the same OS on a desktop machine
for development was a big help and something that you don't really get
with Linux as there are so many different source trees.

Robert Swindells