Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2013 15:53:57 -0600 From: Joshua Isom <jrisom@gmail.com> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Obscure platform testbed Message-ID: <511C0B75.2050401@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <FD28F24C-C19D-403B-8C7A-E0FEBC2D98AA@dragondata.com> References: <FD28F24C-C19D-403B-8C7A-E0FEBC2D98AA@dragondata.com>
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On 2/12/2013 10:20 AM, Kevin Day wrote: > > I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, so if you know of anyone who may be interested in this please forward to them. Right now my company (your.org) does the free amd64/i386 VMs for FreeBSD developers. > > For an unrelated project, we're trying to build a testbed of many of the more obscure *nix boxes, both running their native OS and a modern OS. As an example, we've now got two SGI O2 R10K boxes, one running IRIX and one running NetBSD. We're planning on doing the same for Sparc64(Solaris and FreeBSD), VAX, ARM, etc. Where possible we'll have NFS mounted home directories and NIS to have shared logins across the "cluster". > > First, would any of you find this useful? If this is really only useful for us, I won't bother trying to make this scale beyond our own need for this. If this is popular enough to warrant the extra time, it wouldn't be much more work to make this available to any developer who could use it. > > Second, do any of you have older non-intel boxes that are just gathering dust, that are complete enough to install an OS and plug into ethernet? If it's otherwise heading to a dumpster one day, we'd happily pay for shipping to put it to good/public use. > > -- Kevin > I imagine your request would be more geared towards porters than hackers. What you're creating would be of more use to someone developing portable software. I wouldn't personally use it, but people trying to develop for *nix but not just linux would need something. As for non-intel boxes, you're probably better off with emulators that support networking. Older processors are horribly power efficient by todays standards, and a lot of the interesting systems have emulators available.
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