[rescue] SS10SX Value

[Mouse]

>> NetBSD has supported the SS10 for a very long time (decades, at
>> least).  In recent years, they have to some extent desupported
>> everything not "industrially relevant", I think the phrase was,
>> which includes 32-bit SPARCs.
> FTR: NetBSD/sparc [...] is 'tier 2' / 'evolving at its own pace', it
> shares the status with most of the ports.

Yes.  They spun it very skilfully.  But it *is* spin; it is hard to
hide that they have desupported them significantly.  If someone wants
something for an "industrially relevant" port that happens to break a
"tier 2" port, well, that's just too bad.  It leads to sloppiness.

An example is their heat-seeking gcc: I've seen mail on the list which
makes me think that you have to max out RAM on a machine like an SS10
or SS20 (an SS20 maxes out at half a gig) in order to get it to not
thrash itself to death trying to build the world.  If they actually
_supported_ those machines, they'd've found some way to address that
issue.

> It is included in current releases, you get to run an up to date,
> supported release on your sparc.

*If* you have a machine that can handle a system that bloated.

At one of my jobs, I'm working with a transpiler which, to my mind,
exhibits the kind of problem I'm talking about.  Its executable is
618173528 bytes - significantly over half a gig.  Much of that is debug
symbol table, but even stripped it's 84760408 bytes, over six times one
of my (unstripped!) amd64 kernels.

What I've heard doesn't make me think gcc is that bad yet.  But, for
example, NetBSD also claims to support the VAX, but I've seen VAXen
that physically cannot have more than 16M of RAM (only 24 address
lines) - back in the '80s I supported a real research on such a
machine.  On a 9.1 machine at work, I checked /usr/libexec/cc1, and
it's over 19.5 megs counting just the text segment.  That's an amd64
cc1, not a VAX cc1, but I have trouble imagining that it would do
anything but page itself to death trying to compile even hello-world.

/~\ The ASCII				  Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML		mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B