I agree that improved stability would not justify emulation, because of the
code targeting problem you cited. But would speed help?
Warner suggested that emulated hardware could be faster than the native
hardware being used. If emulated hardware were twice as fast, would that
justify using it in addition to native builds?
ED.
> On 2015, May 22, at 11:10 PM, Nick Holland <n...@holland-consulting.net>
> wrote:
>
> On 05/22/15 13:26, Warner Losh wrote:
> ...
>> FreeBSD has had good luck with using userland qemu emulation to build
>> packages. More stable than random hardware that was never intended to
>> have such a load on it, and quite a bit faster than these little
>> boards.
>
> Think about that a bit. Emulated hw is more stable than the real thing?
> That means one of two things:
> 1) The real HW sucks, and thus, should not be used.
> 2) They code to the emulator, not real HW, and thus the SW sucks, and
> should not be used.
>
> There's a reason the OpenBSD project does only native builds. You
> pretty well nailed it right there.
>
> The ARM platform needs work, not more hardware, this is why it was
> demoted from a "supported" platform to a "current porting effort" around
> 5.6. The people working on the armv7 platform are brilliant people, but
> like most brilliant people, there is no shortage of things for them to
> work on, both for pay and for fun.
>
> Last I was building packages for it (5.6 -- and was told to stop), the
> platform would just crash, trying to keep a dpb cluster running was
> basically reverse wack-a-mole (trying to quickly restart systems that
> crashed). That's not supposed to happen. This isn't a case of "never
> intended to have such load on it", it just needs some work.
>
> Nick.
>
