[rescue] best NetBSD support

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Sunday, June 16, 2002 at 00:00:50 (-0400), Joshua D Boyd wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] best NetBSD support
>
> Personally, I doubt I would choose NetBSD for a workstation unless the
> graphics available on it where so old that NetBSD took full advantage
> of them.  Like perhaps the GX boards...

Somehow I knew you'd say that!  ;-)

> Wow.  NetBSD support appears to be amazingly up to date.  Does anyone
> know if things like libdv have been ported?

The usability of recent Apple hardware with NetBSD really is quite
amazing, as is that of older hardware too, even on decent variants of
their notebooks.

I don't even know what libdv is though, and 'locate' doesn't seem to
return anything relevant, so I'd think not:

	$ locate libdv
	/cvs/master/m-NetBSD/main/pkgsrc/misc/libdvdread
	/cvs/master/m-NetBSD/main/pkgsrc/misc/libdvdread/DESCR,v
	/cvs/master/m-NetBSD/main/pkgsrc/misc/libdvdread/Makefile,v
	/cvs/master/m-NetBSD/main/pkgsrc/misc/libdvdread/PLIST,v
	/cvs/master/m-NetBSD/main/pkgsrc/misc/libdvdread/distinfo,v

> Still, if I had a G4, it would be an OSX machine, not a NetBSD one.

I was going to say something like that, but then I thought better of it!  ;-)

Of course if I had a G4 then I'd have at least two of them, and
hopefully three so that one could run OSX and the others could be used
for NetBSD development and production....

I wish I had the $$$ -- I've lots of room for a few Xserve's in my
server cabinet, even if I do get around to moving the old sparcs into
it!

> > about the only other choice are sparc64 machines and I don't know how
> > well supported you might consider them to be (though the 1.6-BETA is
> > working on a lot more models)....
> 
> If I were actually about to do it, I'd be asking how stable 1.6 BETA is.

I'm using 1.5W, -current as of 2002/06/24, in production (which is
almost a year before the 1.6 branch was started).  My machines aren't
100% stable under all load conditions, but they're a damn sight better
than 1.3.3 was (even patched).  In following current-users, port-i386,
and port-sparc, and having logins on a few -current boxes, I can assure
you its stability has only improved in the last year.  1.5.2 is pretty
stable, but not a whole lot more than my 1.5W, and 1.6-BETA may already
be more stable.

There are the usual nits mentioned on the lists, but nothing major.  I'm
even thinking I'll go back to tracking releases instead of -current,
esp. given they promise to cut 1.7 RSN too.  I went to -current
primarily because it was the only way to get decent I/O throughput
(unified buffer cache), and some other significant user-land
improvements (oh, and recently cross-platform build support too).  Now
that those things are in 1.6 it's very tempting to go back to release
branches (because that'll reduce my own release management overhead
significantly).

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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