[GTALUG] MP BIOS Toshiba - semi revival

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 05:53:56PM -0400, Russell Reiter wrote:
> I think you miss-presume that technology will stay at current levels and
> that capacity planning is done the week before instead of the decade before.
> 
> Reminds me of Bill Gates, no one is going to need more than 640k, or IBM's
> forecast that the entire worlds computing would be done on one or two of
> their mainframes.

So you want to use all the improvements in technology to do pointless
repetitive work?  Why would you want that.

Debian went to parallel startup to improve startup times.  Your idea
would make it much slower.

> > Good grief, try compiling kde each time you boot.  Not going to happen.
> Says you.
> I'm not even going to mention VLIW, concurrency booting in failover,
> control granularity on process exit, or the fact that the first time I
> compiled a kernel on a 486 it took 20 hr's. Want to bet there is one now
> that does it in 20 seconds and how long will it be before that is
> microseconds.
> What's stupid is not engaging possibilities.

Well best kernel compile time I have heard was 7 seconds.  Of course it
was on an IBM p795 with 256 4GHz cores.  That's way beyond what we are
going to have this decade in a typical machine.

Recompiling serves no purpose.  Do you want to first recompile the
compiler before compiling the OS?  What are you going to compile the
compiler with?  How far down do you want to go?  If you want to check
your code, then checksum it and validate that it matches the code last
time you booted and if it does, great, don't bother redoing anything.
If it doesn't match, well then is that because the code is now corrupt
(in which case recompiling is a bad idea) or because you made a change?

Useful uses of modern technology is to make things faster or more power
efficient so they can run longer.  Laptops with 10 to 15 hour battery
lives exist now.  Those we didn't have in the past.  I don't want to
waste that battery life running pointless compile jobs.

I think source distributions like gentoo are stupid, but at least they
only compile things once.  They aren't that crazy.  Some people like what
they can do with tweaking the settings and turning features on and off.
I prefer things that are tested and work and don't waste tons of CPU
time compiling what the distribution could have already compiled.

-- 
Len Sorensen