David Holland <dholland-t...@netbsd.org> 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
