From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 22:40:19 -0600
From: "Ronald G. Minnich" <rminnich@lanl.gov>
To: David Leimbach <leimy2k@gmail.com>,
	Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] First-timer help
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Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0507192227010.19744@enigma.lanl.gov>
References: <20050719T084834Z_FFB700000000@mail2.cu-portland.edu>
	<Pine.LNX.4.58.0507190957300.18527@enigma.lanl.gov>
	<3e1162e605071913056b524945@mail.gmail.com>
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On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, David Leimbach wrote:

> I guess it's difficult to speculate, but do you foresee any problems
> with paravirtualization performance running with Plan 9 as Dom0?  I know
> with "regular virtualization" I've seen awfully bad performance of
> Inferno, at least in the handling of mouse interrupts and graphics.

it's really hard to speculate. I note that ia64 now runs under xen and 
guest OSes run with no mods, and do have graphics/mouse/etc. I have no 
ia64 boxes any more, so have no idea how well this works. 

> Also, due to momentum in the market, I have to devote most of my life to
> working on Linux related software and stuff.  My only real break from it
> is Mac OS X which I also support at work for our MPI implementations.

Actually the 'binary package' discussion of the last few days got me to
thinking about an interesting thing I have noticed in recent year or two.
>>From what I have seen, software is getting less portable and harder to
compile. For a few years in the 90s, I had a mixed linux/freebsd cluster,
and the observation was that before the monoculture hit, a lot of tools
would compile fairly well on both systems with no mods.

Then, a while back, things started getting to the point where they compile
well on linux, but maybe not quite so well on xyzbsd. "Oh, you means
there's an OS other than Linux?". Little linux-specific bits started to
creep in -- usually include file stuff, sometimes network related stuff.

Nowadays, I see things that won't compile on "this Linux" but will compile 
on "that Linux". 2 days ago I had something that would not compile because 
my autoconf was 2.57, not 2.59. 

So, is it a proper use of the word ironic if autoconf, designed to make 
code location-independent, is itself failing because autoconf itself has 
become very version-sensitive? Inquiring non-english-majors want to know!

ron