*BSD News Article 66195


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From: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer)
Subject: Re: Curious about *BSD History
Message-ID: <1996Apr15.133559.5880@wavehh.hanse.de>
Organization: BSD User Group Hamburg
References: <4kh916$1pa@cynic.portal.ca> <4kl863$rno@news.rhrz.uni-bonn.de> <1996Apr12.210743.28292@wavehh.hanse.de> <4kouvl$jh4@news.rhrz.uni-bonn.de>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 96 13:35:59 GMT
Lines: 61
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:17554 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:3106

volker@carlotta.iam.uni-bonn.de (Volker A. Brandt) writes:

>In article <1996Apr12.210743.28292@wavehh.hanse.de> cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer) writes:
>>volker@carlotta.iam.uni-bonn.de (Volker A. Brandt) writes:
>>My newsfeed missed Jordan's and the previous post, could someone mail
>>them to me, please?

>Hope s.o. did that, because I don't have them any more ...

>>>Indeed.  I have the bounce-buffer problem. However, I also believe in
>>>portability, and have an Atari TT.  There are always some tradeoffs
>>>involved.
>>
>>If you want a NetBSD-like OS that runs on i386 and Atari, you might
>>try OpenBSD. 

>But NetBSD runs just fine on an Atari TT.

I meant, if you want and OS for the Atatri and the PC *with*
bounce-buffers. 

>>Some of NetBSD's developers want a bounce-buffer solution that is not
>>specific to one spefic kind of device or one kind of machine. For
>>example, the DEC Alpha machines have ISA bus, but to use ISA cards
>>with DMA you *always* have to use bounce buffers, even with 16 MB of
>>RAM. 
>>
>>The implementation should share as much code as possible for different
>>tasks and abstracts the details so that adding additional usage for
>>bounce buffers is less work.

>Agreed.  I am willing to wait for a thought-out solution.  Also, the only
>alternative would be to do it myself :-)

As I said, I think somewhere are patches for NetBSD. Integrating
OpenBSD's Bouncers into NetBSD should be easy.

>>I can't resist, sorry, but let me say that you bought a machine and a
>>SCSI controller that cannot use more than 16 MB of RAM. Now you put 24
>>MB of RAM in it and want your OS to fix it. Mumble...

>At the time I bought the system, I would have been more than happy if I had
>had the money to get an EISA system, but I didn't.  End of story.  PCI, 
>you ask?  Barely on the market, buggy and not affordable either.

Yes, yes, yes, I sould have kept my mouth shut. But... I assume you
started with 16 MB of RAM. Why didn't you use the money for 8 MB of
RAM to exchange your Motherboard to - say - an Asus SP3G. Those have
been reliable for quite a long time now. A 16 MB SP3G board with a
fast harddisk may be faster for a lot of jobs than a 24 MB ISA/1542
machine (not for interactive X11 work with more than xterm+xbiff,
though :-).

Bounce buffers or not, I hope you find the right OS in this rich BSD
family :-/

Martin
-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de>  -  BSD User Group Hamburg
BSD, Lisp and other programming info http://www.bik-gmbh.de/~cracauer