Re: sun4m and 2.4.x revisited
Andrew,
> It is the case in this case. The thing is, sparc32 hardware is not
> new-and-groovy. It's old and slow. People doing development on
> this stuff understandably want to do it on machines that are fast
> and young. Even ultra1's and ultra2's are 4+ years old, and they're
> the slowest of the bunch, but still much faster than hypersparcs
> even. If you were doing the development, which would you choose to
> do first?
When I have been required to write software that is portable (about a
dozen flavours of Unix), our philosophy was 'port early, port often'.
That's also the philosophy behind Extreme Programming and the spiral
development models.
As for development, I've never found myself to be limited by the
compilation speed of the machine I use. I've only been CPU bound when
I tested software using large 'regression' tests.
> It's not a 32 bit kernel. It depends heavily on the arch. sparc64,
> alpha, ia64 have a lot of 64 bit-ness in them.
Pentium, which is where the leading edge of development seems to be,
the largest number of ports, and the largest user base, is 32 bit.
I still don't understand where the problems lie. Which areas of
kernel functionality are affected? What needs to be done to fix this?
How can we help?
Simon Read
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