Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2003 20:49:00 -0500 (EST) From: Geoffrey <geoffrey@reptiles.org> Cc: current@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Any ideas why we can't even boot a i386 ? Message-ID: <20030227192138.L28626-100000@iguana.reptiles.org> In-Reply-To: <p05200f29ba84405d006d@[128.113.24.47]>
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On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, Garance A Drosihn wrote: > At 4:04 PM -0500 2/27/03, John Baldwin wrote: > > > >I doubt the usefulness of this. i386 kernels were just accidentally > >broken for almost a month and a half without anyone noticing. > >People wouldn't have noticed if phk@ hadn't asked for a volunteer > >either. I386_CPU kernel compiles have been broken in the past for > >rather long periods of time before being noticed as well. > > Well, doesn't that suggest that it would be GOOD if the release > process itself had to build a GENERIC_I386 kernel? > Pardon my butting in here but I thought the point of the exercise was to see if it could be done, and if not, where and why did it fail. The itty bit that including I386 in the kernel made it a pig on pentiums makes sense to drop that support. For posterity sake, including support seems a fun bit, but that is it. 386en are for the most part doorstops (although I'm aware of a few running 4.x in production environments doing routing). The manufacture date on my cpu is 1985. Hunh? There has been a great deal of sweat and grovelling over what to include in floppy boot disks to do ftp installs. To make it include support for vintage hardware would blow out the number of boot floppies to what? Maybe five? Then we have to consider the number of volunteer hours to make it happen? Then the increased labour load of "those that take responsibility for those who make it happen"(tm). Bloat seems to be coming from all sides on this one. Sorry. It can be a tight ship, or a leaky boat from stressed internals. I don't like the latter but am more than happy to participate as long as it is a manageable exercise. I hope we consider it thus as long as any work remains (relatively) trivial (and my apologies to those who have already expended too much on this exercise - phk himself comes to mind). I'm going ahead with trying to cvsup and build from source anyway just because I think this is a fun exercise. 4.7 seemed fine but pkg_add didn't appear to work so grabbed the entire ports tree today and for the past six hours have been building cvsup-without-gui (in fairness. it wasn't pkg_add, but the index file was seen as corrupted by the machine - so it sat there stymied - I believe there has been a post to stabel regarding this today). What I see as concerns if FreeBSD really wants to do this include resurrecting the config utility from 4.x. Even if 5.0 booted from floppy, I was betting it wouldn't find my ISA nic (a de220 that won't use 0x280 for IO though it uses ed for the driver). Installing 4.7 and cvsupping made more sense, but I was willing to give it a spin. Then we have dropped support due to how including 386 kernel support made it a pig with pentiums. Then the ongoing debates on what support to and what not to include in floppies because we want to (try) to keep the number of floppies down. Then we have to consider the amount of memory available on 386en to unpack the above (I hope I'm shining here with 32 MB - a very high number for that vintage hw - all on perfectly matched sticks - my experience is this a a rarity). Then we have to consider the number of functioning 386 boards whose bios survived y2k rollover and of those, how many haven't toasted. More and more, this seems like a NetBSD niche. That said, I don't like ipf and NetBSD doesn't do ipfw. I'd prefer to skip the cultural debate thankyou. Also, I'm on current-, stable-, cvs-all and the security lists. No need to include me on the to: line. Thankyou all for your interest and appreciation in making this the world's finest (IMHO) operating system. Please, let's keep it that way before chasing bragging rights to tedia like what it will boot on outside the core market (and I would be happy to see the heart of that core restricted to hw built since the 386 should porting 386 be non-trivial). I'm going ahead with testing anyway and am happy to share my experience. Thakyou all. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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