Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2000 19:53:05 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Johnny Billquist <bqt@Update.UU.SE>
To: Thor Lancelot Simon <tls@rek.tjls.com>
cc: Michael Sokolov <msokolov@ivan.Harhan.ORG>, pups@minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au
Subject: Re: Newer BSD thingies....nice but then again....
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On Thu, 8 Jun 2000, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 05:46:55PM -0500, Michael Sokolov wrote:
> > jkunz@unixag-kl.fh-kl.de wrote:
> > 
> > > Oh, yes. My VS4000m60 needs only 36 hours to go through a "make build".
> > > This is pure luxury.
> > 
> > And 4.3BSD-Quasijarus completes its make build on my CSRG dev mill, which is a
> > KA655 (3.8 VUPs, whereas your KA46 is 12 VUPs), in a little under 4 hours. The
> > GENERIC vmunix kernel is another 30 minutes.
> 
> My experience with compilers on the VAX leads me to believe that the
> substantial "savings" seen over NetBSD or post-4.3 BSD distributions here
> is almost entirely due to the compiler and options used.  If Quasijarus
> builds like CSRG 4.3 did, with pcc, it can't even use the optimizer *at all*
> for the kernel build, due to severe bugs; either way, pcc runs a lot faster
> than gcc though it generates code that runs a whole lot slower.

Um. Let me put it this way... Userland is a *lot* smaller in 4.3 than
NetBSD... How much time do you think that makes up? The same goes for the
kernel. It's not that 4.3 is faster per se, just that it has a lot less to
build.

> I'd be willing to bet that gcc -O0 would build NetBSD at least ten times
> as fast as gcc -O2; the VAX is (as we all know ;-)) a "rather complex"
> processor, with "rather complex" instruction patterns, gcc is not the
> swiftest of compilers in the first place, and it does a *lot* of work.

True.

> Slow machines *are* good for demonstrating how good your compiler is;
> I recall that rebuilding "compress" with gcc on my 750, way back when,
> pretty much doubled the amount of Usenet news I could handle in a day. :-)

:-)

	Johnny

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol