As a longtime OpenBSD fan and advocate, this has always fascinated me. I loved SGIs back in the day but they are slow as shit today and unusable for any kind of modern desktop usage unless all you do is write code in a terminal. These platforms survive in OpenBSD land because somebody still cares enough about them to enjoy hacking on them. There's no point in saying "Drop them!" because the devs working on them probably could care less what the rest of us think.
Personally, I do wish OpenBSD could somehow regain the popularity it once had and that support for modern hardware like 10GBE and scaling PF throughput w/ multi-core CPUs would improve. I don't know what it would take to bring people back.
Why should everyone else pay the 20K to subsidize ancient hardware support? If there really is a subset of people who really really depend on this, then they should be forking up the cash to pay for something that could be had for free elsewhere if support was restricted to 95% of the platforms in use by the vast majority of people.
If there is an argument that maintaining this will somehow improve security overall and not just on ancient hardware then I would love to see it. But if the Devs working on it could care less of what the rest of us think, then maybe those Devs should pay their electricity bills to support their toy platforms because I could care less about what they think too ...
That is the argument. Obscure kernel and driver bugs are frequently only made apparent as edge cases on said ancient weird hardware, but the fixes benefit all platforms from a code-correctness point-of-view.
But many of those old hardware platforms can be emulated. So if their reason of existence is only triggering edge cases, there are other ways to do so.
Actually most can't be emulated because emulators don't exist and those which can typically can't be emulated correctly (Sparc emulators for example which are notoriously sparse and bad quality).
Some of the architectures also have different endianess and incredibly complicated peripherals to the cost effective host machines as well meaning that it's actually more power efficient to run native. A headless 100MHz VAXstation for example draws less power than the equivalent host that would be required to provide a full, accurate emulation with peripherals. These aren't arcade machines.
OTOH, the preservation of such historically relevant architectures would benefit enormously from emulation. This is an aspect that should get some attention and which could, possibly, open up another funding avenue to the project as a side effect.
Not really. The OS syscall interface, ABI and the fact everything is abstracted via your C compiler normalises the differences between the machines pretty well meaning you only end up dealing with portability issues.
Portability issues is where real hardware benefits. It's where you have battles of unusual register sizes, endianess, host/network order differences, different memory models and memory protection, different performance characteristics, different timings and different exploits.
Unless the emulation is 100% accurate, including timing, which is a really difficult thing to do (look at the effort MAME goes to), then the benefits over real hardware is moot.
Emulators are also expensive to write due to the above, have their own bugs and don't always recreate the bugs in the real hardware (which are sometimes exploitable).
I was thinking about MAME (more specifically, about MESS). If two groups benefit from a single effort, it seems to be an good investment, even if it costs nearly twice as much.
Also, using emulated hardware could cut down the usage of the real pieces, which could then be better studied and preserved. Doing less builds on vintage hardware is, actually, a good idea.
Emulation isn't guaranteed to manifest the same edge case issues that surface these defects, though.
Then again, it's possible that emulation could surface other edge case issues. That's completely orthogonal to the value of non-emulated archaic architectures for this purpose, however.
Is that clear? It's not as if when SGIs are taken away, developers efforts will seamlessly efficiently shift to amd64. I like to think that "oddities" like SGI are data-points to test against, and help keep abstraction alive by disallowing traps like pretending that everything is an x86.
I'd be interested to hear whether or not this is the case from people closer to such a condition, though (ie: OpenBSD, NetBSD, ???).
If they would rather refuse free hosting and will "not allow the conversation to that way" then it means they want to keep support for some physical hardware that's hard to find in existing datacenters.
This is like saying "I don't care if my arcade goes out of business, I'm going to keep the power hungry cabinets alive even though they only get used once every 3 years."
"... and unusable for any kind of modern desktop usage unless all you do is write code in a terminal."
Sounds good to me. Many times (actually most times) I have no need for a "desktop" metaphor on my screen in order to get things done. I actually get more done big jobs done faster without the desktop metaphor in the way.
"... the devs working on them probably could care less what the rest of us think."
That's what makes them so special.
Perhaps in the long run the most "powerful" and sought after computers will not be the ones with the latest chips, but the ones that the user has the most knowledge of and control over.
Can you imagine the old-timer reminiscing: "Remember when computers didn't have backdoors built-in?" or "Remember when you did not have to pay for a license to write programs for hardware you bought?"
Personally, I do wish OpenBSD could somehow regain the popularity it once had and that support for modern hardware like 10GBE and scaling PF throughput w/ multi-core CPUs would improve. I don't know what it would take to bring people back.