On Tue, 14 Jan 2020 at 19:34, Al Kossow via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > On 1/14/20 9:47 AM, David Brownlee via cctalk wrote: > > > The code is quite old and the drivers are not MP safe, so its being > > proposed that the code be dropped > > Goose step to the monocuture > > netBSD, we USED to run on everything..
A monoculture in this context would be for everyone to switch to Linux :) Older versions of NetBSD are not going away, but in the interest of there being something other than *just* older versions, people continue to develop. To effectively run on current hardware it needs to be able to use multiple processors, including NUMA and big/little topologies. So it comes down to remaining portable only for a wide set of older hardware, including some combinations for which literally no users exist, or balancing older hardware with new. A good example of the latter is a current thread on how to get jemalloc to work correctly across the various m68k platforms which have different page sizes, without switching to a dynamic page size and the concurrent overhead, plus recent changes to the audio mixer subsystem to ensure it is fast enough to play on those same m68k systems. I like being able to run NetBSD on my work laptop, run xen (likely to switch to nvmm soon) to virtualise a bunch of Linux test boxes for work, and use ZFS on my home server, with syncthing for data redundancy to multiple remote locations. Losing that ability to rely on it day to day in order to keep support for older hardware for which no-one has stood up and offered to write code or even test changes... seems a bad trade. On that final point - on the NetBSD list it appears that several people have spoken up regarding an interest to keep using ARCNET on NetBSD, in some cases they just have hardware and a willingness to test, which is the difference between "we need to update the code, but have no users", and "someone finds this useful" NetBSD is pretty reluctant to drop actual hardware platforms - to my recollection it has effectively dropped three - da30, a custom wire wrap board of which possibly only one ever existed, - pc532, a home-brew NS32532 board which was dropped when gcc dropped processor support - acorn26, the original 26bit address space ARM2 based machines We live in an imperfect world, but NetBSD is pretty much the only *nix still actively trying to keep a modern OS running on older hardware, and they're doing it by focussing on machine independent subsystems and drivers rather than "fork another copy and hack for each case". Thanks David
