5 ms·

As a longtime OpenBSD fan and advocate, this has always fascinated me. I loved SGIs back in the day but they are slow as shit today and unusable for any kind o

As a longtime OpenBSD fan and advocate, this has always fascinated me. I loved SGIs back in the day but they are slow as shit today and unusable for any kind of modern desktop usage unless all you do is write code in a terminal. These platforms survive in OpenBSD land because somebody still cares enough about them to enjoy hacking on them. There's no point in saying "Drop them!" because the devs working on them probably could care less what the rest of us think. Personally, I do wish OpenBSD could somehow regain the popularity it once had and that support for modern hardware like 10GBE and scaling PF throughput w/ multi-core CPUs would improve. I don't know what it would take to bring people back.

gwu78 13y ago
"... and unusable for any kind of modern desktop usage unless all you do is write code in a terminal." Sounds good to me. Many times (actually most times) I have no need for a "desktop" metaphor on my screen in order to get things done. I actually get more done big jobs done faster without the desktop metaphor in the way. "... the devs working on them probably could care less what the rest of us think." That's what makes them so special. Perhaps in the long run the most "powerful" and sought after computers will not be the ones with the latest chips, but the ones that the user has the most knowledge of and control over. Can you imagine the old-timer reminiscing: "Remember when computers didn't have backdoors built-in?" or "Remember when you did not have to pay for a license to write programs for hardware you bought?"
mjolk 13y ago
>There's no point in saying "Drop them!" because the devs working on them probably could care less what the rest of us think. If it's worse for the rest of the ecosystem, there's a point.
- bch 13y ago
  Is that clear? It's not as if when SGIs are taken away, developers efforts will seamlessly efficiently shift to amd64. I like to think that "oddities" like SGI are data-points to test against, and help keep abstraction alive by disallowing traps like pretending that everything is an x86. I'd be interested to hear whether or not this is the case from people closer to such a condition, though (ie: OpenBSD, NetBSD, ???).
  - mjolk 13y ago
    If they would rather refuse free hosting and will "not allow the conversation to that way" then it means they want to keep support for some physical hardware that's hard to find in existing datacenters. This is like saying "I don't care if my arcade goes out of business, I'm going to keep the power hungry cabinets alive even though they only get used once every 3 years."
efuquen 13y ago
Why should everyone else pay the 20K to subsidize ancient hardware support? If there really is a subset of people who really really depend on this, then they should be forking up the cash to pay for something that could be had for free elsewhere if support was restricted to 95% of the platforms in use by the vast majority of people. If there is an argument that maintaining this will somehow improve security overall and not just on ancient hardware then I would love to see it. But if the Devs working on it could care less of what the rest of us think, then maybe those Devs should pay their electricity bills to support their toy platforms because I could care less about what they think too ...
- bashinator 13y ago
  That is the argument. Obscure kernel and driver bugs are frequently only made apparent as edge cases on said ancient weird hardware, but the fixes benefit all platforms from a code-correctness point-of-view.
  - danieldk 13y ago
    But many of those old hardware platforms can be emulated. So if their reason of existence is only triggering edge cases, there are other ways to do so.
    - rosser 13y ago
      Emulation isn't guaranteed to manifest the same edge case issues that surface these defects, though. Then again, it's possible that emulation could surface other edge case issues. That's completely orthogonal to the value of non-emulated archaic architectures for this purpose, however.
    - chrissmithuk 13y ago
      Actually most can't be emulated because emulators don't exist and those which can typically can't be emulated correctly (Sparc emulators for example which are notoriously sparse and bad quality). Some of the architectures also have different endianess and incredibly complicated peripherals to the cost effective host machines as well meaning that it's actually more power efficient to run native. A headless 100MHz VAXstation for example draws less power than the equivalent host that would be required to provide a full, accurate emulation with peripherals. These aren't arcade machines.

gwu78 13y ago

"... and unusable for any kind of modern desktop usage unless all you do is write code in a terminal." Sounds good to me. Many times (actually most times) I have no need for a "desktop" metaphor on my screen in order to get things done. I actually get more done big jobs done faster without the desktop metaphor in the way. "... the devs working on them probably could care less what the rest of us think." That's what makes them so special. Perhaps in the long run the most "powerful" and sought after computers will not be the ones with the latest chips, but the ones that the user has the most knowledge of and control over. Can you imagine the old-timer reminiscing: "Remember when computers didn't have backdoors built-in?" or "Remember when you did not have to pay for a license to write programs for hardware you bought?"

mjolk 13y ago

>There's no point in saying "Drop them!" because the devs working on them probably could care less what the rest of us think. If it's worse for the rest of the ecosystem, there's a point.

bch 13y ago
Is that clear? It's not as if when SGIs are taken away, developers efforts will seamlessly efficiently shift to amd64. I like to think that "oddities" like SGI are data-points to test against, and help keep abstraction alive by disallowing traps like pretending that everything is an x86. I'd be interested to hear whether or not this is the case from people closer to such a condition, though (ie: OpenBSD, NetBSD, ???).
- mjolk 13y ago
  If they would rather refuse free hosting and will "not allow the conversation to that way" then it means they want to keep support for some physical hardware that's hard to find in existing datacenters. This is like saying "I don't care if my arcade goes out of business, I'm going to keep the power hungry cabinets alive even though they only get used once every 3 years."

efuquen 13y ago

Why should everyone else pay the 20K to subsidize ancient hardware support? If there really is a subset of people who really really depend on this, then they should be forking up the cash to pay for something that could be had for free elsewhere if support was restricted to 95% of the platforms in use by the vast majority of people. If there is an argument that maintaining this will somehow improve security overall and not just on ancient hardware then I would love to see it. But if the Devs working on it could care less of what the rest of us think, then maybe those Devs should pay their electricity bills to support their toy platforms because I could care less about what they think too ...

bashinator 13y ago
That is the argument. Obscure kernel and driver bugs are frequently only made apparent as edge cases on said ancient weird hardware, but the fixes benefit all platforms from a code-correctness point-of-view.
- danieldk 13y ago
  But many of those old hardware platforms can be emulated. So if their reason of existence is only triggering edge cases, there are other ways to do so.
  - rosser 13y ago
    Emulation isn't guaranteed to manifest the same edge case issues that surface these defects, though. Then again, it's possible that emulation could surface other edge case issues. That's completely orthogonal to the value of non-emulated archaic architectures for this purpose, however.
  - chrissmithuk 13y ago
    Actually most can't be emulated because emulators don't exist and those which can typically can't be emulated correctly (Sparc emulators for example which are notoriously sparse and bad quality). Some of the architectures also have different endianess and incredibly complicated peripherals to the cost effective host machines as well meaning that it's actually more power efficient to run native. A headless 100MHz VAXstation for example draws less power than the equivalent host that would be required to provide a full, accurate emulation with peripherals. These aren't arcade machines.