Re: [HACKERS] PostgreSQL for VAX on NetBSD/OpenBSD

Dave McGuire <[email protected]> Sun, 29 Jun 2014 15:10:41 -0400
Newsgroups gmane.os.netbsd.ports.vax,gmane.os.openbsd.vax,gmane.comp.db.postgresql.devel.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 06/29/2014 02:06 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> 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.

  Oh ok, I understand.  Thank you for the clarification.

> 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.)

  I have several multiprocessor VAXen, but only one of them is capable
of running NetBSD, and I only (currently) have a single processor in
that machine.  I can (and want to) fix that, but not right away.

              -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ/3
New Kensington, PA