> 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.
>
> 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.)
Depending on how often you'd like the system to try to run a compile, I'd
be happy to run it on a VAXstation 4000/60. It runs bulk package builds
for pkgsrc, but we could do a compile every week or so (every day would
really eat into cycles for other packages).
John
