Re: Advice Wanted On Building NetBSD/vax in SIMH

Hi!

On Mon, 2024-03-18 16:39:57 -0400, NCommander <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm currently looking at doing a full build of NetBSD/vax in the near future in
> SIMH, and possibly livestreaming the whole thing. Before setting off on what
> will likely be a project, I was hoping for advice. I saw a post recently
> talking about one of the NetBSD 10 RCs taking around two months in real
> hardware, and was curious if that's the time I could expect to see in SIMH/vax.

Nice idea :)

> I'm also wondering how much disk space and memory I should setup in SIMH, and
> if I should increase the size of any swap. Most of my experience deals with
> building Linux distributions, so I only know the basics of what to expect from
> build.sh. I saw that the toolchain recently got a full overhaul, and if there's
> anything I can do to help as far as testing/stressing things out.

This is my 4000/60 with an emulated 2 GB root disk and another 16 GB
(also a PiSCSI emulated disk) for /usr/src:

# df -h
Filesystem     Size   Used  Avail %Cap Mounted on
/dev/sd0a      1.7G   1.3G   337M  80% /
kernfs         1.0K   1.0K     0B 100% /kern
ptyfs          1.0K   1.0K     0B 100% /dev/pts
procfs         4.0K   4.0K     0B 100% /proc
tmpfs           20M   4.0K    20M   0% /var/shm
/dev/sd1c       15G    11G   3.7G  74% /usr/src

# swapctl -l
Device      1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Priority
/dev/sd0b       16384     6256    10128    38%    0
_swapfile_     716800     2028   714772     0%    1
Total          733184     8284   724900     1%


I kind of forgot to have a reasonable amount of swap (as that host
only has 80 MB RAM), so I placed some swapfile. Not the most
performant option, but it worked successfully.

  This setup (~ 16 GB for sources, 2 GB for the system, ~ 700 MB swap
along with 80 MB of real RAM) was successfully able to produce a
working ISO install image (which I also tested successfully.) Details
about my build approach are in my most recent emails. If you go for a
512 MB SIMH VAX, things may be quite faster (esp. on a fast host) than
with my real hardware VAX. With the most modern, top-of-the-line
hardware, I guess I would be a matter of a few days only.

MfG, JBG

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