3 Jun
2013
3 Jun
'13
11:05 a.m.
On Jun 3, 2013, at 1:51 PM, Jochen Kunz <jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote:
On Sun, 2 Jun 2013 07:37:18 -0400
David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
I don't disagree. I'm saying it makes it unsuitable for my own needs,
which admittedly shouldn't stop the NetBSD overlords from doing the
things that need doing to make it efficient and useful on modern
hardware. Essentially, to make it accomplish both goals at once would
require a fork at this point because the userland is no longer
efficient for older/smaller hardware.
I beg to differ. I've run NetBSD for a long
time on my old (pre-iMac)
PowerPC Macs as well as the 68k series because it still supports
them fairly well. Recent releases (there was a gap from 1.6 to 5.0 where
I didn't upgrade) have been really unpleasantly slow, primarily
because of bloat in the userland.
It makes for a difficult situation; I'd gladly just run 1.6, but any of the
common third-party userland components (Apache, etc.) have the
same problem, and I'd want to be running the latest for security's
sake.
Well. See. Thats how it goes. Time is not standing still. Things
evolve. Things change. Things grow. Thats live. If software, be it an
OS like NetBSD or applications / server daemons like apache, would not
keep up with the general growth of things in the entire eco-system,
it will die.
If you run a current release of a software system, you have to expect
that it needs at least a halfway current hardware to run on. If you have really old hardware you have to accept
that current
software will run slow. If you want fast software on ancient hardware
you have to use contemporary, i.e. ancient software.
Or run modern software designed to run on older or smaller machines,
which is usually targeted toward the embedded market. NetBSD has
some of that, but the rest of the environment has gotten too big for
the older PPCs.
There are plenty of tiny OSes meant for embedded or vintage computing
that I may turn my spare cycles towards. There's a really neat bare-
bones RTOS-type one out there called AtomThreads that I started a
ColdFire port to a while back. I should really pick it back up.
If you want "modern" features, you have to
run modern software and this
in turn requires "modern" hardware. You have to pay a price for the
improved functionality. Either it will run slow on your 11/730 or you
have to upgrade your hardware. Elsewise stay with older software that
runs fast but lacks newish featurism.
Again, though, there is a middle ground. It's a much, MUCH smaller
niche, though.
Nevertheless: NetBSD is still compact and efficient in
comparision to
most Linux distributions. It is also not tainted with some Linuxisms
like systemd...
That much is true. I still like NetBSD in principle, and it still
runs a hell of a lot better on my 604 machines than Linux does.
I think I just need to find a new horse to back for future dev,
though I still want to finish my SWIM3 driver for NetBSD before I
move onto something else.
- Dave