Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2001 22:56:36 +0100 From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> To: Andrea Campi <andrea@webcom.it> Cc: developer@freebsd.org, current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/sys/i386/conf GENERIC Message-ID: <31573.979509396@critter> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 14 Jan 2001 22:16:52 %2B0100." <20010114221651.A3627@webcom.it>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In message <20010114221651.A3627@webcom.it>, Andrea Campi writes: >> >> I think it's the time to throw i386 over the railing and lower the >> >> waterline a fair bit on -current. >> > >> >Does it make any sense at all to make 80386 a separate platform >> >a'la pc98/alpha/ia64? Do enough people care about it? >> >> No it doesn't. I think you'll find that running 5.x in less than >> 32MB is going to be painfull or impossible in the first place. > >Sorry Poul, I think the question here is: "if we decide to remove i386 support >BUT a few people still want to use it and can maintain it as a separate >platform port, is it an option to do so, from a technical point of view?" > >Personally, I don't care about i386 support in -current, but if it's possible >to keep it in parallel, then why not? (This is a general answer, not just about i386 support:) Any feature in FreeBSD needs a minimum amount of maintenance. If nobody cares about some particular bit of code, it will slowly of quickly rot away. It's not that the actual bits themselves change, but FreeBSD changes around them all the time. APIs get tweaked, usage models change, all the time, a continuous growth process. If nobody has the hardware to test it on, *and* the inclination to do so, it will not get tested, and the code will erode as a result. I have a 386SX/20 CPU, but I'll be damned if I can be bothered to boot FreeBSD-current on it, in fact it didn't even boot a 4.x last I tried. Any feature can survive in FreeBSD if sufficient manpower is spent maintaining it: If you came in with 10 dedicated and able hackers, you could get a VAX-11 architecture into FreeBSD. If you can muster the people needed to write the increasinly quirky assembler code replacements for features the i386 CPU doesn't have I'm sure you can keep the i386 alive for some years. The reason against doing so is that it complicates our code. Makes it less readable. Forces us to make tradeoffs which hits modern hardware on the performance meter. Yes, like anybody else I'll be sad to see i386 support go, but hey... none of my i486 systems can even boot the current install floppy anymore, I think you need 32MB RAM for that and I only have 16MB in my systems. If we should do anything for the i386, it should be for some intrinsic value that particular chip has. Apart from maybe the rad-hard and possibly VHDL-macro aspects, the only unique property the i386 has for me these days is "history". I don't do satelites, I suspect most of you don't, and I suspect those of you who do know just how far FreeBSD-5.x will be from that market segment for some years to come. If you design something with a VHDL i386 core these days, I bet you're not trying to load it with a unix kernel anyway. If you are you'll have so many tweaks already, that I doubt you would want to look at FreeBSD 5.x for your one-chip design. Personally I would not really find it interesting to have a BSD2.X style "FreeBSD-lite" created for the i386 for mostly sentimental reasons, and I have a perfectly good reason for that: My i386 box has that one last intrinsic feature served much better with the OS I have installed on it: "386BSD 0.1newer + patchkit". Not only does it boot in 20 seconds flat but most importantly it reminds me how far we have come in the last 9 years by sweeping the broom every so often. As David Scheiffler wrote in his X11 book: "It is as important to decide what a system is not as to decide what it is. Do not serve all the world's needs; rather, make the system extensible so that additional needs can be met in an upwardly compatible fashion." Poul-Henning PS: Anyone with a i386 box is welcome to send me email if they want a copy of 386bsd and the patchkit -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?31573.979509396>