Failure

Currently, I'm thinking of going ahead and using SVR4 packages for Amiga UNIX despite their limitations. This format is actually relatively advanced on Solaris. There's many features present that don't *appear* to be present in the ancestor version on Amix. It would be really awesome to...

* track dependencies (woo!)
* fetch files from the internet (yeah!)
* have pre- and post-install scripts (yay!)

But it appears that NONE of those are present. Basically...

Although I've taken a sabbatical from working on Amiga UNIX stuff, I've been thinking about how to reinvent the wheel again with a custom package format. I have some experience with building RPMs and debs, and through that I have some idea how the final product should look and what it should do. I've been mulling over how to implement it. My main focus is speed since 25MHz is slow. Modern packaging systems do a lot of checks and double checks, and wrap a great deal of logic into what they do....

NetBSD 5.0 is way faster than Amix 2.1, at least so far. About the only thing that Amix does faster is scroll the screen if I'm using the console directly. It also boots slightly faster if you're not using DNS. Preliminary benchmarks show huge improvements in disk throughput. It really puts Amiga UNIX to shame.

Other novelties include mounting my AmigaDOS partitions, using CD-ROM for installation, being able to use the "entire" 4.5GB HD, etc.

I'm wondering...

I'm taking a ham-fisted approach to porting Bonnie to AmigaOS 3.9. Meaning this: I'm a sysadmin. I write mildly complex shell/perl scripts, at best. Theoretically I should be able to drive a compiler since I'm taking courses, but I don't do it every day, as would be obvious by anyone looking at how I've been mangling Bonnie.c. The actual file I will keep to myself for now to keep from being berated. :-)

Here's a brief summation of a play I like to call "Idiot Porting Software":...

Answer: pretty slow. The last two days - yes, it's that slow, granted I wasn't doing the tests 24/7 - I've run Bonnie I/O benchmarks on the Amiga UNIX box. Since these results are incomplete, I don't think it's worth a forum thread but maybe it's still interesting to some people.

The complete results for Amix 2.1c are located here. Here's a summary though. Apologies for screwing up the layout if you have a low res display, but it's my damn blog :-)

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