I was looking to test a change related to buffering in cat(1) and wondered what was the slowest system I could use which was capable of running the current versions of NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. An old PC and the ARM based BeagleBone Black sprang to mind immediately, then a PowerPC Mac? SPARC64?

Apart from a Sun Fire T1000, I do not have any SPARC hardware, sun4v is only supported on NetBSD & OpenBSD at present, FreeBSD/sun4v was only a pre-alpha rough cut from before the days of version 7 and sparc64 support may be going away in FreeBSD moving forward.

Considered the BeagleBone Black but currently NetBSD-HEAD does not boot on it port-arm/51380 and FreeBSD has issues with running DTrace bug/211389. So that was off the list.

A G4 based PowerPC Mac is supported between my choice of BSDs, unfortunately I couldn’t get a working disk burnt from the FreeBSD iso files to try it out on a 12″ PowerBook. bug/211488.

I settled on running i386 builds on a Alix 2c3 I have, it has 256MB RAM and a 500Mhz Geode CPU, currently running FreeBSD/i386 11-BETA3 without issue and has no problems with any of the other BSDs. It’s a little too “modern” and high spec though in my test.