20 Aug
2020
20 Aug
'20
4:30 a.m.
On Tue, 2020-08-18 19:52:47 -0700, Chris Hanson via cctalk <cctalk at
classiccmp.org> wrote:
On my laptop, a `make -j4' (building all simulators and running
their tests) takes some 6min 20sec. Fair enough. Building just one
(ie. ,/BIN/vax aka. vax3900 which I care the most about personally) is
a matter of 21 seconds. Sure, that could be faster with careful
dependency tracking, but that's okay for me.
(What bugs me more is that Debian doesn't have up-to-date SIMH
packages, so I have to either use that stuff from stone age or package
it myself...)
On Aug 18, 2020, at 5:50 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
It's debateable whether or not the all-in-one builds are good or bad.
Ie. GCC went into quite some development effort to gain LTO (link-time
optimization) up'n'running, which was built quite exactly to allow
optimizations that would otherwise only be possible if all sources are
compiled in one run.
With any halfway modern hardware, build times probably don't really
matter. Sure, if you're sitting in front of it waiting to finish a
build, every second feels like ... ages.
However, in my experience speed isn't really all that important.
Correctness is. And the Makefile quite works, even without pulling in
all the GNU autoconf or CMake stuff.
On 8/17/20 5:34 PM, Chris Hanson via cctalk
wrote:
Did you miss the part where I said it would make it much easier to
experiment with it if the build system was better? For example,
switching between different networking implementations can require a
rebuild. One thing that would make it much easier to
experiment with SIMH
in scenarios like this is if its build system wasn't horribly
redundant.
Why are you mentioning SIMH's /build/ system in a thread
discussion boot times? I wouldn't
object if SIMH's /build/ took 20 minutes if it's
something that only happens every 3-12 months while starting on a
tiny Linux / *BSD / et al. system that /boots/ in a low number of
seconds.
SIMH improves quickly enough that you won't want to do a 20 minute
build every 3-12 months, but instead perform new builds with some
regularity. Between that and ease of experimenting (or the lack
thereof) a bad
build system can really hold back a project.
I suspect that any one user probably only uses one or two
simulators, not all of them. They compile in a timeframe of some
20 seconds. Most of all users won't be active SIMH hackers, so they
will have that just once in a while when they `git pull'.
If I were to start "from scratch" with SIMH, the steepest part in my
learning curve was to get it properly configured to run something
"useful." Building isn't a real issue IMHO. What would be worth a lot
would be a repository of well-crafted configs along with proper
startup and download scripts (for OS tapes / disk images.)
MfG, JBG
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