5 ms·

Excellent point. Software testing (not for stability but instead for usability, and certainly not for compiling, lol) ought to be done on minimal-spec systems (

Excellent point. Software testing (not for stability but instead for usability, and certainly not for compiling, lol) ought to be done on minimal-spec systems (the specs of which might possibly be dialed-down further once optimization is done, which would be a bonus). Assuming that a faster system (or one with more RAM or storage) will cure the real problem has allowed all sorts of sloppiness to creep into software.

LoganDark 4y ago
We once heard a story about how someone optimized their game engine for a crappy old netbook and ended up with some tens of thousands of frames per second on any vaguely modern system. This works. -Emily
- mro_name 4y ago
  as you mention gaming – do you know the doom-in-lego-brick? https://kilograham.github.io/rp2040-doom/ https://kilograham.github.io/rp2040-doom/ and brick assembly https://youtube.com/watch?v=6wBrOV2FJM8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=6wBrOV2FJM8 There are some video links in the (german) article https://heise.de/-7448263 https://heise.de/-7448263. Mind-blowing.
rahen 4y ago
NetBSD is still routinely tested on 486s and old Vaxen, and developed on ARM SBCs or Pinebooks. It helps keep the code base light and efficient. The latest minimal kernel will still boot on 4MB of memory on 32 bits machines, although it will take more than that to be usable. Unfortunately NetBSD can only do so much considering the sad state of the Linux ecosystem. GCC has become so big it won't self host on most platform, making cross compilation mandatory for them. Switching to PCC would be a solution, but a lot of software won't compile with PCC and obviously their maintainers couldn't care less. Then you have the newer behemoths like Rust and Go. Once they start creeping in some majors projects like GCC or OpenSSL, a lot of machines will turn into e-waste, and the resource requirements will climb even further.

LoganDark 4y ago

We once heard a story about how someone optimized their game engine for a crappy old netbook and ended up with some tens of thousands of frames per second on any vaguely modern system. This works. -Emily

mro_name 4y ago
as you mention gaming – do you know the doom-in-lego-brick? https://kilograham.github.io/rp2040-doom/ https://kilograham.github.io/rp2040-doom/ and brick assembly https://youtube.com/watch?v=6wBrOV2FJM8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=6wBrOV2FJM8 There are some video links in the (german) article https://heise.de/-7448263 https://heise.de/-7448263. Mind-blowing.

rahen 4y ago

NetBSD is still routinely tested on 486s and old Vaxen, and developed on ARM SBCs or Pinebooks. It helps keep the code base light and efficient. The latest minimal kernel will still boot on 4MB of memory on 32 bits machines, although it will take more than that to be usable. Unfortunately NetBSD can only do so much considering the sad state of the Linux ecosystem. GCC has become so big it won't self host on most platform, making cross compilation mandatory for them. Switching to PCC would be a solution, but a lot of software won't compile with PCC and obviously their maintainers couldn't care less. Then you have the newer behemoths like Rust and Go. Once they start creeping in some majors projects like GCC or OpenSSL, a lot of machines will turn into e-waste, and the resource requirements will climb even further.