Re: VAX portt was Re: [HACKERS] configure on linux

On Fri, 6 Feb 1998, Andrew Martin wrote:

> With the difficult bit done, maybe I should take a look at getting
> it running on the old VMS uVAX-II I have sitting at home :-)

That would be cool -- but no, the difficult bit is not done.  If you
want to get PostgreSQL to work well under VMS, especially on a II,
where you can't run anything newer than 5.5, and thus can't use the
POSIX interface stuff from VMS 6, you'll need to rewrite the access
methods at the lowest level to utilize RMS properly, or performance
will absolutely suck.  As an example, I got well over an order of
magnitude of speed improvement for the IOZONE benchmark under VMS by
writing a couple of tens of lines of RMS-savvy interface code...

Oh.  You weren't serious.  OK.

However, the VAX port is running nicely under NetBSD.  It seems to
be sane -- reading through 100 Kbytes of regression.diffs for the
Sparc port and 60 Kbytes for the VAX port is hard work, especially
since the diffs are all either slightly differently worded error
messages, tiny precision differences in floating point math hardware,
zero instead of minus zero in math results or different limits on
max/min representable numbers.  In addition, there are a number of
date and time differences that I don't understand -- like why a minute
is sometimes "1 min" and sometimes "1 min 60.00 sec"...

Anyway, the patches for NetBSD/vax are sent separately, with comments.

-tih
--
Popularity is the hallmark of mediocrity.  --Niles Crane, "Frasier"