[ARMedslack] Building software on ArmedSlack

[Niels Horn]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Stuart Winter <m-lists at biscuit.org.uk> wrote:
> If you want a standard unified script: the examples of pidgin will be all
> you need - because I updated these scripts for Slackware and put the
> changes in :-)
> Pat's also been adding the auto $ARCH detection I added to the pidgin
> script, which the single "arm" architecture; but what's missing from
> the main build scripts are:
>  $ARCHQUADLET="-gnueabi"
> and the CFLAGS of "-march=armv4t"

I took a quick look and it seems promising :)

>> Yes, but this was only to test the concept. The idea is to use
>> Hercules on my SheevaPlug when it arrives. Then I can carry a
>> mainframe around in my bag :D
>
> Oh right, well that makes more sense.  Wow, if the emulator of Hercules
> works OK in QEMU, it'll be a lot faster on the Sheevaplug.
> Are S/390s really that slow?! :)

Well, MVS is from the 70s/80s, when processors were still in the 1-10
MHz range, so that's simple to emulate. Now, emulating a modern
mainframe with z/OS running on it and hundreds of users connected is a
whole other story :) But if I can get it to run nicely with three or
four users just for demonstration, I'm happy!
Mainframes have processor speeds nowadays that do not impress too much
(a few GHz, just like our desktops), but they have *lots* of them and
*LOTS* of memory. And special processors for special jobs, etc.
Together with an OS IBM has been writing for about 50 years, they make
fine workhorses.

>> The idea of using Qemu is that it works nice with snapshots, so I can
>> fall back to a stable installation if I mess things up.
>
> yeah tell me about it.  I bricked my -current workhorse last week when I
> missed a configure option in the new version of e2fsprogs, then
> upgradepkg'd the result; the system started falling over.  It took me
> almost a day to work out what had happened!  Fortunately I have two
> machines running -current: one live and one stable so I can login and
> rebuild the packages and just reinstall the broken one using the
> installer.
>

That's the fun part of working with computers ;)

Niels