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Comment by maaku | Hacker News Reader

Why is this on the front page?

Well maybe for the entertainment value or the aspect that Theo was not involved in the exchange. But probably the best highlight for me was:

In the year 2015, it is a complete nonsense to produce new 32-bit system designs. It's the new ``640KB of memory will be enough for everybody''.

> Also, would it change your mind if Google starting releasing 32-bit > MIPS Chromebooks?

Of course not. They can release crap hardware if they want to, this doesn't mean we have to support it.

Remember, this is Miod. Ask him why they support VAX still. Or his 68k side projects.

Or contrast it with how Linux is managed:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/1/20/50

I hope you're not implying from that reference that Linux is managed better.

Who knows how much test coverage they even have for odd architectures in Linux. Just because they say it's "supported" means nothing.

I was first and foremost thinking about the style of communication and the friendly attitude.

I just thought it was worthy of comparison.

It is zero cost for linux kernel to just keep an optional feature and quite a problem for openbsd to accept and maintain another arch after that student is done with his project and moved on.

because they find bugs and keep cleaner code?

and MIPS32 wouldn't?

Well, it looks like the code would have to be special purposed unless they just didn't support over 512MB. I would imagine the work would be far in excess of what is normal. NetBSD tries to run everywhere. OpenBSD has retired some platforms.

68k is dead.

Don't know why your getting downvoted since OpenBSD killed the 68K port in 5.1.

maybe that a statement like "xxx is dead" is perhaps too much in line to the bully joke "bsd is dead" that was prominent from linux jocks many years ago, more mature nowadays and not seen that `joke` in a while myself (though don't read /. much these days either).

Also when the the CPU is still in use today in places, again hardly constructive and with that probably the glibness of the whole statement without qualifiers that found disfavour.

In the context of the conversation, it was a true statement about OpenBSD's supported platforms (mvme68k was discontinued in 5.5, mac68k in 5.1). Also, given the parent of the post was being a bit rude to a specific person, its an appropriate response.

Using the old slashdot troll against a BSD person is a new one.

> Also when the the CPU is still in use today in places, again hardly constructive and with that probably the glibness of the whole statement without qualifiers that found disfavour.

Its not in use by OpenBSD which is the topic of conversation

I've been writing m68k asm code and building gcc-based toolchains until two months ago for the computer architecture exam.

I don't know anything about Miod, but my understanding is that OpenBSD devs work on what interests them. They don't feel any need to justify it beyond that. So if they have devs who want to maintain a VAX build, they will.

What the original post described was whether the project would consider picking up the end result of a student project and carrying it forward. Why would they do that?

I wouldn't expect much love from OpenBSD for a CPU with a PowerVR GPU.

Why do you say that?

PowerVR isn't documented. The board just isn't very interesting to any operating system project other than Linux, other aspects of I/O are weak too.

I posted it because I had no idea of this limitation (quirk?) of the MIPS32. I guess that's why the 64-bit R4000 (MIPS III instruction set) came pretty early in the 64-bit cycle.

There's a workaround called Enhanced Virtual Addressing (EVA) that was added in revision 3.5 of MIPS32:

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=144012041817764&w=2

I don't know whether it's a realistic solution, though.

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