Regarding the "less architecture support to save electricity" argument, I'm not sure one follows the other. Computing power has grown to a point that emulators are perfectly valid - particularly for older systems.
I think a push to package and maintain emulators for many of these older architectures would be beneficial in many ways. There's some amount of this already - there are instructions for the simh simulator for the VAX arch for instance. The obvious benefits I couldd see would be: 1) You could spin up builds on them w/ little to no effect on electricity usage. 2) Even if the OpenBSD foundation's arch X machine dies, there would still be infrastructure to maintain the port. 3) It would widen the possible number of developers if people could spin up older architectures in an emulator. 4) It would make OpenBSD a valuable tool for accessing older media and documenting older architectures. I know emulators are not perfect, so a physical machine would be superior. But if there was some encouragement for emulators for archs I think those would be useful benefits. Support for multiple archs brings interest and exposes bad code in ways limited arch support does not. Dropping that to save electricity is not a valid reason with today's compute power. Anyway, it's been a long time since I did stuff with OpenBSD, but I think it would be a shame to drop such support. So I'll back up my words with some cash. And if I get a roundtuit, perhaps some code or docs as well. Kevin -- Kevin Lyda Galway, Ireland US Citizen overseas? We can vote. Register now: http://www.votefromabroad.org/
