Re: Dead ports [Re: config(5) break down]
On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 05:30:43PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote: On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 09:23:35PM +, Herb Peyerl wrote: Last time I bought a cavium board it was $5k USD... An Octeon 3850 was $700 for 1521 piece part... I didn't think they had anything reasonable down below $500? (and as far as I remember, they already had FreeBSD running on the Octeons). Admittedly it's been a few years. Cavium and Raza (Now NetLogic) both have low-core-count parts in the way sub-$100 price range. Same basic architecture as the big parts (these aren't their cut-down 32-bit parts), just less cores and less goodies. And documentation? Dave -- David Young OJC Technologies dyo...@ojctech.com Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933
Re: Dead ports [Re: config(5) break down]
I *do* think it's a useful datapoint to note that sun2, pmax, algor, etc. are never, ever downloaded any more. Right, and these dead ports must be euthanized. The mountain of unused device drivers and core kernel code is a signficant hinderance to people working in the kernel. Fully agree (as one having this pain too). For those single developers who still have such machines, as a hardware replacement and moral compensation, TNF could buy some new ARM or MIPS board for hacking. Would be a win-win case, would not? Probably we should ask Core and Boards what's the best for TNF. I'm afraid there is no win-win case among many paranoiac geeks we have, but I won't hesitate to abandon all my machines and devices if it's better for TNF. No replacements are required. IMO, tiering ports might be better for us than best or die scheme. In that case you can leave unused ports and devices in dead state. --- Izumi Tsutsui
Re: Dead ports [Re: config(5) break down]
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hello, On Mar 19, 2010, at 4:14 PM, David Young wrote: Regardless of what we do or do not do with sun2 et cetera, TNF could buy some ARM and MIPS boards for developers. ARM and MIPS boards, however, are not so precious as a sun2. In fact, they're abundant, and cheap. Nevertheless, there does not seem to be much interest in porting to them. Why is that? I don't care about hardware without graphics ;) *duck* have fun Michael -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin) iQEVAwUBS6PdwcpnzkX8Yg2nAQLEbAgAt7l14I8GJvIVxYHB9b16LsQuOdY+WaS+ Kf+4qupZ9ZbvgYtNYvtPT1yklMoiAIDxCZAJF80lQyXH0OcKdLajmYMShnV/wCww X1gBVLbcO+85UzaA9a9ekEIH6bpbPChJizVqNxvGKpoaPKNdl6nXEoly7P3DmmYb fa0sh5LdKjBKx1ZTnGR1E6TAmI0MqFg1RHjYjibBT5FiJQF/IMbbpepoEfbUi/MC gLEj9RyG6xw/vwHnxH1HdJKNWwtRJv/jJcgdmPytw6Si58yoAEI2UJowIynXQjyh bEyPOyUPwlkHRKLpJl3CqxgEck7qwbbL57TMd7EYDGAF0R5k1DqcSg== =uyR5 -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: Dead ports [Re: config(5) break down]
der Mouse mo...@rodents-montreal.org wrote: [...] sun2, pmax, algor, etc. [...] Right, and these dead ports must be euthanized. For those single developers who still have such machines, as a hardware replacement and moral compensation, TNF could buy some new ARM or MIPS board for hacking. Would be a win-win case, would not? Wow. Talk about missing the point. There is a reason why I put hardware replacement in quotes. Because of exactly what you described as fundamentally emotionally motivated. Given reason to think that $PORT does not actually have any users, perhaps. But, as various people have pointed out, lack of downloads of binary builds is hardly evidence of that. ... And I never said that downloads is justification for removal of any port. In fact, ARM and MIPS have zero point something of all downloads. They are nowhere near being unused, though. However, point being is that a *lot* of time is spent (when revamping certain interfaces) by MI kernel developers going through, for example, barely maintained m68k ports with a *massive* code duplication, acorn26 (in 3 or so months I could find only *one* person who could do testing on it), museum's sun2 (IIRC, Izumi was the only who cared?) and so on. Somewhere, I have a dusting clone of ZX Spectrum called Santaka 002, but I am not of the opinion that it should be supported by NetBSD. Not only because it is unrealistic. It would be a total maintenance pain (yet another one) for *others*. -- Mindaugas
Re: Dead ports [Re: config(5) break down]
On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 03:14:57PM -0500, David Young wrote: Regardless of what we do or do not do with sun2 et cetera, TNF could buy some ARM and MIPS boards for developers. ARM and MIPS boards, however, are not so precious as a sun2. In fact, they're abundant, and cheap. Nevertheless, there does not seem to be much interest in porting to them. Why is that? Neither so abundant nor so cheap as you think, it seems to me, if you want something that's modern enough to really be useful and has a vendor friendly enough to make software development specifically for the platform an exercise anyone would want to do in his spare time...! That loongson-based laptop might be one cute exception to the rule. But eval boards for things like MIPS network processors are not exactly free, and documentation not trivial to come by without NDA. If you're going to buy 10,000 and make your own boards, sure, these platforms are cheaper than things like Soekris. But qty 1 it's a whole different ballpark, which in my opinion is why Soekris even exists at all! Thor
Re: Dead ports [Re: config(5) break down]
On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 04:45:21PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote: On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 03:14:57PM -0500, David Young wrote: Regardless of what we do or do not do with sun2 et cetera, TNF could buy some ARM and MIPS boards for developers. ARM and MIPS boards, however, are not so precious as a sun2. In fact, they're abundant, and cheap. Nevertheless, there does not seem to be much interest in porting to them. Why is that? Neither so abundant nor so cheap as you think, it seems to me, if you want something that's modern enough to really be useful and has a vendor friendly enough to make software development specifically for the platform an exercise anyone would want to do in his spare time...! I guess that it depends on your application whether these boards are useful or not, but these places sell inexpensive boards that have more-or-less open architecture/documentation: www.embeddedarm.com www.openplug.org www.routerboard.com www.ubnt.com In NetBSD, we have support for only a few of the boards at those links. I don't think that it's because TNF does not buy developers the boards. Dave -- David Young OJC Technologies dyo...@ojctech.com Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933
Re: Dead ports [Re: config(5) break down]
On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 05:19:47PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote: Have a look at http://www.rmicorp.com/assets/docs/2070SG_XLR_XLS_Product_Selection_Guide_2008-12-16.pdf specifically at the bottom few rows on the XLS chart. You're looking at parts that have 3 or 4 Gig-E interfaces, tons of useful hardware offload, and are, by published reports, way down in the sub-$50 range. You can get very similar stuff from Cavium. Last time I bought a cavium board it was $5k USD... An Octeon 3850 was $700 for 1521 piece part... I didn't think they had anything reasonable down below $500? (and as far as I remember, they already had FreeBSD running on the Octeons). Admittedly it's been a few years.
Re: Dead ports [Re: config(5) break down]
On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 09:23:35PM +, Herb Peyerl wrote: Last time I bought a cavium board it was $5k USD... An Octeon 3850 was $700 for 1521 piece part... I didn't think they had anything reasonable down below $500? (and as far as I remember, they already had FreeBSD running on the Octeons). Admittedly it's been a few years. Cavium and Raza (Now NetLogic) both have low-core-count parts in the way sub-$100 price range. Same basic architecture as the big parts (these aren't their cut-down 32-bit parts), just less cores and less goodies. Even the very bottom of the line parts typically still have multiple GigE interfaces on them and various other highly useful stuff. -- Thor Lancelot Simont...@rek.tjls.com All of my opinions are consistent, but I cannot present them all at once.-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On The Social Contract
Re: Dead ports [Re: config(5) break down]
On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 05:30:43PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote: Cavium and Raza (Now NetLogic) both have low-core-count parts in the way sub-$100 price range. Same basic architecture as the big parts (these aren't their cut-down 32-bit parts), just less cores and less goodies. Even the very bottom of the line parts typically still have multiple GigE interfaces on them and various other highly useful stuff. FYI -- and I doubt you could really buy just one of these at this price -- http://avnetexpress.avnet.com/store/em/EMController/Network-Processor/Cavium-Networks/CN5220-500BG729-SCP-Y-G/_/R-8960980/A-8960980/An-0?action=partcatalogId=500201langId=-1storeId=500201 Some of the other things I've been talking about have lower pricing in the real world than this does. Thor
Re: Dead ports [Re: config(5) break down]
On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 06:19:27PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote: FYI -- and I doubt you could really buy just one of these at this price -- http://avnetexpress.avnet.com/store/em/EMController/Network-Processor/Cavium-Networks/CN5220-500BG729-SCP-Y-G/_/R-8960980/A-8960980/An-0?action=partcatalogId=500201langId=-1storeId=500201 Some of the other things I've been talking about have lower pricing in the real world than this does. Nice. The 3850 was a really nice part.. I had a lot of fun writing code for it...
Re: Dead ports [Re: config(5) break down]
On Fri, 19 Mar 2010, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote: FYI -- and I doubt you could really buy just one of these at this price -- http://avnetexpress.avnet.com/store/em/EMController/Network-Processor/Cavium-Networks/CN5220-500BG729-SCP-Y-G/_/R-8960980/A-8960980/An-0?action=partcatalogId=500201langId=-1storeId=500201 I tried to get Avnet to provide a quote on an eval board for an Octeon and they never got back to me. (The eval board didn't have a Buy_Now button, only a Request_Quote button.) - | Paul Goyette | PGP DSS Key fingerprint: | E-mail addresses: | | Customer Service | FA29 0E3B 35AF E8AE 6651 | paul at whooppee.com | | Network Engineer | 0786 F758 55DE 53BA 7731 | pgoyette at juniper.net | | Kernel Developer | | pgoyette at netbsd.org | -
Re: Dead ports [Re: config(5) break down]
On Mar 19, 2010, at 1:25 PM, Michael wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hello, On Mar 19, 2010, at 4:14 PM, David Young wrote: Regardless of what we do or do not do with sun2 et cetera, TNF could buy some ARM and MIPS boards for developers. ARM and MIPS boards, however, are not so precious as a sun2. In fact, they're abundant, and cheap. Nevertheless, there does not seem to be much interest in porting to them. Why is that? I don't care about hardware without graphics ;) I don't care about hardware with graphics. :)
