5 Jun
2012
5 Jun
'12
9:25 a.m.
On 5 June 2012 07:58, Kirn Gill <segin2005 at gmail.com> wrote:
NetBSD runs on VAX, and has support for running a.out
binaries from 4.3BSD.
NetBSD also includes a IPv6 stack (KAME), and they have the best
cross-platform source-based package management system, pkgsrc.
Aside from how you're going to install it (and you're going to need, from
the VAX's perspective, a giant hard drive - 200-400MB is what the base
system alone will need), you'll also need a *lot* of patience while Apache
and friends compile. Good news, though, your stuff won't compile to
mind-boggling (even for modern machines) large binaries because NetBSD/vax
has VAX support in it's ELF ld.elf_so. Don't know what the virtual memory
subsystem is like for NetBSD/vax, but if it's anywhere as good as Linux or
any *BSD on modern machines, you'll have copy-on-write fork()s and
libraries that share read-only segments across unrelated main executables,
which will be extremely useful in an environment strapped for free RAM.
The 4000/90 feels quite performant under NetBSD (as well it should
being a 40 VUP machine :), though gcc is slow compiling c and just
*painful* compiling c++. Setting pkgsrc to generate bzip compressed
packages rather than gzip is also a poor choice.
NetBSD ships with a tiny httpd, and for personal preference I would
have run nginx rather than apache, but that would have broken the
acronym.
The NetBSD distribution itself is obviously trivial to cross compile
from pretty much any POSIX compliant system (I use my
Thinkpad), and
for those who prefer to spend their VAX cycles executing
non-compiler
code there should be a set of binary pkgsrc packages available after
the netbsd-6 release (probably trickling in and completing quite some
time after the release, you know how it is)
If anyone would like a test shell account on wopr, just drop me an ssh
public key (unless you regard ssh keys as the spawn of the devil in
which case something else could be arranged).
On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 7:12 PM, Jonathan Katz <jon
at jonworld.com> wrote:
> I've been debating doing this with my MicroVAX 2. Hmmmmm.
>
How much memory & disk does it have? I lost my uVaxII a long time ago
& have not been able to locate another :(