The O2 shouldn't need a PSU capacitor replacement yet.

If you want to give the SCSI disk a better chance, place it flat on a table and rotate rapidly, then stop. You should feel the spindle spin.

Hardware of this era is still quite reliable so I don't think you will have problems.

There are plenty of tutorials on where to dig into the epoxy and add a cr2032 battery holder to fix it permanently.

Same deal with various SPARC machines (those will at least power on)

Servers are cheap on ebay and the older Intel boards (also sold by Dell, Fujitsu,..) can be upgraded to newer CPUs that are either less power hungry or faster with more cores and sort-of HT. HP are generally not upgrade-able and SGI/ia64 is a special case with lots of other custom hardware as usual.

Annoyingly many Linux / gcc developers want to remove ia64 support from their source trees because the architecture is no longer commercially relevant.

As a necrocomputing enthusiast it's quite sad, but not much one can do about.

If only this old junk was as popular as the various homecomputers...

So do I.

> Adacore holds at least the copyright of their own contributions and therefore can decide whether they want to release their version of GNAT with or without the runtime library exception.

Indeed.

> the FSF version eventually inherits also the contributions of Adacore, but the Adacore version is more current.

AdaCore contributes to GCC, with some contributions copyright FSF, some copyright AdaCore.

AdaCore retains full rights on the later, limited by whatever private agreement they have with the FSF.

Whether it is more current or not is not relevant to the discussion, and given that GNAT CE has release cycles of 1 year it stands to reason that FSF GNAT gets bugfixes that GNAT CE will only get in 2022.

> This doesn't have anything to do with source or binary version.

I'm now pretty convinced you're reading things that I didn't write.

You seem to be under the impression that dual licensing only works because AdaCore GNAT contains newer files.

However, AdaCore can download stock upstream gcc, remove the linking exception from files they hold copyright over, and distribute this result in source and binary form on their website.

This is due to their unique status with the FSF, something that other companies and private contributors can not do.

Finally, I have never suggested recompiling AdaCore GNAT CE sources will result in a GNAT compiler with runtime exception.

Instead I've pointed out the mechanism of how they achieve this dual licensing: A) unique status as copyright holders alongside the FSF B) strategic inclusion or removal of the runtime exception in each and every file they hold copyright over.

https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/gcc/ada/libgna...

Compare with the same file from the GNAT 2021 CE install:

GNAT/2021/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/10.3.1/rts-native/adainclude/g-socket.ads

you will find there are a bunch of blank lines where the runtime exception was.

This is a bit painful (intentionally so) but it can be done.

Unlike other parts of GCC, GNAT copyright is held by AdaCore due to some special arrangement with the FSF.

For the compiled CE releases on their website, AdaCore strips the runtime exception:

  -- As a special exception under Section 7 of GPL version 3, you are granted --
  -- additional permissions described in the GCC Runtime Library Exception,   --
  -- version 3.1, as published by the Free Software Foundation.               --

You are of course free to build the compiler yourself, or use the Ada compiler that comes with your distro.

The sources are available, you just don't get a tag that tells you which exact combination of files AdaCore used to build and verify their binaries.

This is a strategic PITA, and AdaCore have in recent years made some moves to improve the situation, with being active on github and responding to issues in general.

I've found the contribute page, but that leads straight to https://github.com/mdn/archived-content/tree/main/files/en-u...

Have they removed it all? I can find old stuff in the archived github repo, but that's about it. What's the official entry point?

/usr1/compiler_cpu/code/current/build/hcc_arm64le_ark/../../open_source/hcc_arm64le_build_src/gcc-7.3.0/configure --build=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu --host=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu --target=aarch64-linux-gnu --with-arch=armv8-a --prefix=/usr1/compiler_cpu/code/current/build/hcc_arm64le_ark/arm64le_build_dir/gcc-ark-7.3.0-x86_64_aarch64-linux-gnu --disable-multilib --disable-libmudflap --enable-nls --disable-sjlj-exceptions --enable-gnu-unique-object --enable-linker-build-id --enable-shared --with-arch=armv8-a --with-gnu-as --with-gnu-ld --disable-libstdcxx-pch --enable-libstdcxx-time=yes --enable-lto --enable-c99 --enable-clocale=gnu --enable-multiarch --enable-gnu-indirect-function --enable-checking=release --enable-threads=posix --enable-plugin --enable-long-long --with-pkgversion='Compiler CPU V200R005C00SPC030B003' --enable-languages=c,c++,fortran,lto --with-headers=/usr1/compiler_cpu/code/current/build/hcc_arm64le_ark/arm64le_build_dir/gcc-ark-7.3.0-x86_64_aarch64-linux-gnu/sysroot/usr/include --with-sysroot=/usr1/compiler_cpu/code/current/build/hcc_arm64le_ark/arm64le_build_dir/gcc-ark-7.3.0-x86_64_aarch64-linux-gnu/sysroot --with-build-sysroot=/usr1/compiler_cpu/code/current/build/hcc_arm64le_ark/arm64le_build_dir/gcc-ark-7.3.0-x86_64_aarch64-linux-gnu/sysroot --with-gmp=/usr1/compiler_cpu/code/current/build/hcc_arm64le_ark/arm64le_build_dir/gcc-ark-7.3.0-x86_64_aarch64-linux-gnu --with-mpfr=/usr1/compiler_cpu/code/current/build/hcc_arm64le_ark/arm64le_build_dir/gcc-ark-7.3.0-x86_64_aarch64-linux-gnu --with-mpc=/usr1/compiler_cpu/code/current/build/hcc_arm64le_ark/arm64le_build_dir/gcc-ark-7.3.0-x86_64_aarch64-linux-gnu --with-isl=/usr1/compiler_cpu/code/current/build/hcc_arm64le_ark/arm64le_build_dir/gcc-ark-7.3.0-x86_64_aarch64-linux-gnu --libdir=/usr1/compiler_cpu/code/current/build/hcc_arm64le_ark/arm64le_build_dir/gcc-ark-7.3.0-x86_64_aarch64-linux-gnu/lib64 --disable-bootstrap --enable-fix-cortex-a53-835769 --enable-fix-cortex-a53-843419 --with-system-zlib

Nothing out of the ordinary at first glance. The tarball has your usual compiler stuff (binutils, gold) and a standard linux sysroot with glibc.

Whatever "ARK" is, I don't see it.

Each.

As a cyclist, N+1 is real :)

$5 is an arbitrary price, and in no way shape or form comparable with a business making a single board computer and having to buy components at market rate.

https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/CompilerConstruction/...

This isn't the first time either, they shot down plenty SyAF fighters and helicopters over Syria, it's just that nobody in the West cares.