From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Nov 10 23:06:39 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id XAA03124 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 10 Nov 1997 23:06:39 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers) Received: from usr03.primenet.com (tlambert@usr03.primenet.com [206.165.6.203]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id XAA03098 for ; Mon, 10 Nov 1997 23:06:32 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from tlambert@usr03.primenet.com) Received: (from tlambert@localhost) by usr03.primenet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id AAA02943; Tue, 11 Nov 1997 00:06:11 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199711110706.AAA02943@usr03.primenet.com> Subject: Re: Newest Pentium bug (fatal) To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 07:06:10 +0000 (GMT) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, helbig@Informatik.BA-Stuttgart.DE, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <24579.879226329@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Nov 10, 97 09:32:09 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > Gee, sounds like you picked the perfoect porting platform... and me > > sitting here with this Multia with full system documentation, NetBSD > > source that runs on the thing, Linux source that runs on the thing, > > and a partial port of the FreeBSD VM code to the thing! Boy, is my > > face red! > > You act as if this was my choice. Digital donated the stuff and since > beggers can't be choosers, we took whatever they had to give. It > wasn't until afterwards, when they proved unable to supply any docs, > that we knew it would even be a problem. BTW, if this is truly your position, and you are not trying to "one-up" me (which is meaningless for me, I assure you; I am egoless in the Buddhist sense of the word, as well as the Jungian), then I'd have to say that "beggers are not the people who should be doing the port, since they might end up with undocumented hardware". You should start your calculation with "competed port = ?" instead of running calculations and hoping you end up with "completed port" as one of a number of brute-force soloutions. It's not like a lack of documentation is a totally unprecedented event, or even unexpected by a reasonable person for a new platform. Either you are being supported by DEC or you aren't. It's a nice, binary compare, which you should be capable of making on your own without me harrassing you into it by declaring it an Aristotilian mean. In that sense of undocumented vs. documented, it was *alway* your choice; the only variable was "who could afford to participate", and you made that decision based on your inherent biases, since it's not like all DEC hardware is undocumented. Only the hardware you felt compelled to choose because of your own bias. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.