Last I checked, NetBSD doesn't support any sort of multiprocessor VAX. Multiprocessor VAXes exist, but you're stuck with either Ultrix or VMS on them.
Pat
On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 2:06 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
Dave McGuire <mcguire@neurotica.com> writes: > On 06/29/2014 10:54 AM, Andres Freund wrote:
>> Maybe I'm just not playful enough, but keeping a platform alive so we >> can run postgres in simulator seems a bit, well, pointless.
> On the "in a simulator" matter: It's important to keep in mind that > there are more VAXen out there than just simulated ones. I'm offering > up a simulated one here because I can spin it up in a dedicated VM on a > VMware host that's already running and I already have power budget for. > I could just as easily run it on real hardware...there are, at last > count, close to forty real-iron VAXen here, but only a few of those are > running 24/7. I'd happily bring up another one to do Postgres builds > and testing, if someone will send me the bucks to pay for the additional > power and cooling. (that is a real offer)
Well, the issue from our point of view is that a lot of what we care about testing is extremely low-level hardware behavior, like whether spinlocks work as expected across processors. It's not clear that a simulator would provide a sufficiently accurate emulation.
OTOH, the really nasty issues like cache coherency rules don't arise in single-processor systems. So unless you have a multiprocessor VAX available to spin up, a simulator may tell us as much as we'd learn anyway.
(If you have got one, maybe some cash could be found --- we do have project funds available, and I think they'd be well spent on testing purposes. I don't make those decisions though.)