[LV] Now for another bit of noise , ok any noise ...

[Jan-Benedict Glaw]

On Mon, 2009-03-02 11:04:22 +1030, Kim Hawtin <kim.hawtin at adelaide.edu.au> wrote:
> > > I can't speak for the others, but myself I've been recently
> > > working on code (and cursing broken patches for the compiler)
> > > more actively then ever.  If you volunteer to become a tester,
> > > then I will have a nice surprise for you soon, i.e. once I have
> > > something remotely buildable and ready to debug. ;)  Hopefully
> > > that'll happen in less than half a year's time.  Stay tuned.
>
> The weather is cooling down again, no longer 30c at night, soon I
> will need a heater!  ie; turn on the uVAXII's. I have had them
> netbooting last winter/autumn, but I did not have much in the way of

Urgs... With 30°C at night, I'd probably go and sleep in an old coal
mine or something like that.

> a working root file system to do testing with. I had netbsd
> netbooting, with root and swap over NFS, for the VAXes and a couple
> of Sun3's.  I would like to get a better root file system and native
> build environment going again.  Thoughts? I also have space to host
> source & images if required.

We're really not yet there. I'm not yet synced up with Maciej, but to
get something "pretty", we need to polish a lot of thing:

  * Get a remotely useable GCC. (This is not that hard. Matt Thomas
    (NetBSD hacker) produced a nice large patch polishing GCC's VAX
    backend. It's ment to fix/implement PIC generation, brings in
    predicate.md and now uses IRA.)
  * Re-Port the VAX stuff to some current kernel version. (Working
    straight on it, I think it's a week it'll take making it commpile
    again.)
  * Get a libc up'n'running. (For a start, to do some testing, maybe
    uClibc is a good start, because a somewhat working port exists. In
    the long term, we'll want to have GNU libc. One problem here is
    that there's currently no __thread implementation in GCC/binutils,
    which current GNU libc requires. There once was a generic
    approach, but I'm not sure if that's still available or if we even
    *want* to use it. Another nitpick is that I actually don't know
    (yet :-P) how to get libm up'n'running. The VAX architecture has a
    different floating point unit that most of today's machines, and
    so it'll either need soft-float (slow) or something own (needs to
    be written).)
  * Compile a new root filesystem with current software.
  * Build Debian :)
  * Support DSSI storage on QBus VAXen.
  * Support SMP (at least on a 6320, possibly soon being a 6330).

> What is the best way to host the build environment?  Cross compiled
> from i386 or on something like simh?

A cross compiler is the way to go. Anything else will be painfully
slow. For testing/running compiled kernel/software, SIMH is quite
nice. (You don't need a switched-on VAX all the time and SIMH on a
fast PeeCee is actually *faster* than a real VAX. And you can easily
put a hugh amount of RAM into SIMH, which isn't all that easy with a
real VAX...)

MfG, JBG

-- 
      Jan-Benedict Glaw      jbglaw at lug-owl.de              +49-172-7608481
Signature of:         "really soon now":      an unspecified period of time, likly to
the second  :                                 be greater than any reasonable definition
                                              of "soon".
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