(please keep my debian.org address in the distribution list,
not the mirbsd one, as it has better chance to interact with
other mail providers out there for this… except Googlemail,
which, of course, is no proper mail provider and actively
disrecommended because it fails to collaborate for FOSS work)
On Wed, 13 Nov 2024, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
On Thu, 2024-11-14 at 07:36 +1300, Michael Schmitz wrote:
I didn't say that - just supporting Arnd's point that much of the RAM
constrained old m68k software won't benefit from today's user space.
We're talking about an open source stack here. No one is going to run an
old binary from the 80s on a current system. And if you want to run old
software, you're certainly also not running the latest kernel.
Indeed.
We should consider something with 256 MiB RAM the “default”
(which also matches the usual “smallest VM”; there are VMs
with just 128 MiB RAM, but even just running apt-get update
can stretch them to swap) and, perhaps, try to keep systems
with 64 MiB working, perhaps with custom kernels. But 256 MiB
is plenty for a normal OSS stack (i.e. no dbus/systemd, proper
classical init), without X11 anyway, but perhaps even with it.
SysVInit uses a huge set of bash scripts where every action involves spawning
sh scripts, mksh’s /bin/lksh gives a 3× speedup, compared to
GNU bash, here, probably even more, as it’s statically linked.
[ low memory ]
Again, the problem is not Debian-specific. Heck, it's not even Linux-specific.
ACK.
If this involves changes at kernel level (syscall parameter alignment?)
however, my recommendation would be to rather drop the port than end up
with new kernels no longer backwards compatible with old user space.
I don’t buy this.
But, as has been pointed out, if we make the current alignment explicit
everywhere, the kernel ABI does not have to change¹. And new syscalls,
ioctls, structs, etc. can just be made with natural alignment in mind
(I bet most are already anyway) and with padding assumptions made expli‐
cit (which again probably is done already anyway).
① not for the userspace ABI to change, anyway; that can be decoupled
is the point here
bye,
//mirabilos
--
11:56⎜«liwakura:#!/bin/mksh» also, i wanted to add mksh to my own distro │
i was disappointed that there is no makefile │ but somehow the Build.sh is
the least painful built system i've ever seen │ honours CC, {CPP,C,LD}FLAGS
properly │ looks cleary like done by someone who knows what they are doing
