Re: Development Setups

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>]

adam.keys@engr.smu.edu said:
> I was thinking of starting with a modern machine for developing/
> compiling on,  and then older machine(s) for testing.  This way I
> would not risk losing data  if I oops or somesuch. 

With journalling filesystems you needn't worry _too_ much about losing 
data; depending of course on what you're hacking on. Having two separate 
boxen for development and testing is mostly valuable because you can keep 
working when you break it - it doesn't take your entire desktop environment 
down with it.


adam.keys@engr.smu.edu said:
>  Which brings me to the final question.  Is there any reason to choose
>  architecture A over architecture B for any reason besides
> arch-specific  development in the kernel or for device drivers?

If you're developing device drivers and have the choice, pick something 
esoteric to enforce good behaviour. Something which does out-of-order 
stores, has non-cache-coherent DMA, is big-endian and preferably 64-bit. I 
think both mips64 and sparc64 boards can meet all those criteria - if not, 
get as close as you can. 

--
dwmw2