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BSD Operating Systems Hardware

Alpha Relegated To FreeBSD's Tier 2 70

Posted by timothy from the alpha-is-dying dept.
flynn_nrg writes "Scott Long, from the release engineering team, has sent this message to the freebsd-alpha mailing list:'The day has finally come to demote FreeBSD/Alpha to tier-2 status. While I'm sure that this will come as a disappointment to many, the simple truth is that there is no longer enough community interest nor developer interest to fix critical bugs and assist in the development of new features. We've struggled with this for several years, and it's time to set the proper expectations before we enter 5-STABLE.'" (Read on for the rest of the announcement.)

"Being Tier-2 does not mean that Alpha support will actively be removed from the tree. It does, however, mean that ISO images might not be produced for upcoming releases, pre-compiled packages might not be produced and more (in fact, this already stopped several weeks ago), and future security advisories might not be issued for it. This only applies to FreeBSD 5.3 and beyond; existing alpha releases are still supported by the security team according to their schedule, and future 4.x erratas and releases will still support it also. Demotion is also not a terminal condition. If in the future there is an renewed interest and the existing problems can be fixed, it can be re-considered for tier-1.

Alpha was a very important platform for FreeBSD. It paved the way both for 64-bit cleanliness and for being able to support multiple architectures. It was also a nice and refreshing architecture in a world of bland and hackish i386 systems. Thanks to Doug Rabson for porting to it in the first place and thanks to everyone who supported it afterwards.

The Release Engineering Team"
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Alpha Relegated To FreeBSD's Tier 2 More

Alpha Relegated To FreeBSD's Tier 2

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  • This is a good thing (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Energy ought to be put towards platforms that still exist.

    Alpha is as dead as a doornail. While RISC may still be flourishing, this pioneer is dead.

    Keeping Alpha support around is like keeping Lenin's pickled corpse in a mausoleum. It may invoke feelings of nostalgia, but he's not coming back no matter how hard we wish he would.

  • alpha is dead (Score:3)

    by konmem ( 628046 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:17PM (#9436869)
    or dying? On a serious note -- how many people still use Alpha? It is a shame to see such an elegantly designed processor die.

    • Re:alpha is dead (Score:5, Funny)

      by revmoo ( 652952 ) <[slashdot] [at] [meep.ws]> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:29PM (#9436974) Homepage Journal
      Netcraft confirms it! Alpha is....... nevermind

    • Re:alpha is dead (Score:5, Informative)

      by isthisthingon ( 785412 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:52PM (#9437131) Homepage
      Uhhh. I do. :-) We have two Alpha boxen running BSD for a variety of purposes. They're brutally dependable and really just plain fun to work with. The SRM BIOS is more like a shell than a BIOS in the sense that most people are familar with. For someone familar with Unix, it makes so much sense--no goofy menu/submenu systems like most i386 BIOSes to go hunting through for the setting you're trying to change.

      We had a situation where a cooling unit failed and a couple of RAID cards, drives, RAM, and what not fried in some of our i386 boxes, but the Alphas (knock wood) have never missed a beat even after that.

      I SOOO wish there was a bigger call for 'em in the marketplace, these two servers are among the finest pieces of engineering I've ever encountered. Really. They're great. But, alas! Alphas got trounced by Intel. :-|

      Sigh. Sad day.

      • Re:alpha is dead (Score:3, Interesting)

        by gorodish ( 788476 )
        We have 23 DS-10 Alpha boxes that were left over after we retired our old render farm. They are four years old, but still have the horsepower to make dandy network servers (though we run OpenBSD on them). And the SRM console is very powerful and makes them true machine room servers. I can even reset them and cycle power via the serial port, using the RMC (Remote Management Console) feature. They are great workhorse machines. Thanks DEC!
      • Yes, unfortunatly intel destroyed them.
        If alpha was in intels posistion now, computers in general would have been much better.

        too bad.
        • If by destroyed you mean violated their agreement with DEC and copied parts of the chip design of the Alpha into the Pentium II, then yes.

    • Re:alpha is dead (Score:5, Interesting)

      by johnalex ( 147270 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @10:00AM (#9441996) Homepage
      We're using a DEC (that's right, the original DEC) Alpha 2100 here to run our credit union software. We've upgraded almost everything that can be upgraded short of adding an additional processor. This unit came in the door in 1994. It's still running as it has for almost 10 years now: 24x7x365.

      I've always said, if DEC had hired quality marketing people in addition to quality engineers, the company would still be in business. They designed and built rock-solid stuff.

      • Re:alpha is dead (Score:3, Interesting)

        by timothy ( 36799 )
        Re: the DEC business story, you might find the book "The Ultimate Entrepreneur" interesting; it's about Ken Olsen and the rise of DEC. Even more outdated than the link below says, but certain aspects of history, uh, tend not to change :) I found this book in a free-books pile somewhere, and enjoyed it. Olsen, says the book, was a control freak (in a good way) and in particular exacting about packaging / chassis designs.

        timothy

        (http://www.bitworm.com/detail/0809245590/The_U l ti mate_Entrepreneur_The_Story_
      • Do you shut it down every leap-day for maintenance? Or is it really 24 x 7 x 365.2422?
    • I have a Dec 5300 dual 533 I use as my firewall/router/fileserver/battle.net server/shoutcast server. It does it's job fine, but it's a power hungry beast, and compatibility isn't quite up to what you get with the i386 platform. Compiling the kernel was a bitch, but I finally got it up to kernel 2.6 branch. I'm seriously considering switching down to an old P2 or a duron 900 for the power saving and compatibility alone. I don't do heavy lifting, and I don't really take advantage of the 64 bitness, so there

    • Lots of people still do. There is one more clock increased Alpha chip to be released yet and people are still buying them. I should know, I'm a contractor and I specialize in integration of Tru64/TruCluster's on Alpha. All my business involves new systems and new projects, and this years Alpha business for me has been better than last year, so far.
      • Well, HP aren't marketting the pa-risc anymore, sgi are going down the pan and the itanic isn't really taking off, leaving the alpha to sell itself without any marketting, which is pretty much what it did all along.

  • welcome back ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hubertf ( 124995 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:57PM (#9437162) Homepage Journal
    ... to NetBSD.

    Bread from the bakery,
    meat from the butcher,
    and multiplatform operating systems from The NetBSD Foundation.

    - Hubert

  • Bright Side of Things (Score:5, Funny)

    by vga_init ( 589198 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:53PM (#9438047) Journal
    Hey, there's always VMS! =)

  • This doesn't mean it's dead (Score:5, Interesting)

    by agent dero ( 680753 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @12:00AM (#9438837) Homepage
    All this really means is that they will not concentrate their efforts on the Alpha port as much as AMD64, and i386.

    It is by no means dead, if you have an Alpha, you can try to help them out ;)
  • just about the only things that run on sparcs/sun hardware is solaris, free|netBSD and debian. (and really old/outdated versions of other distros).

    • Gentoo works as well (Score:3, Interesting)

      by harikiri ( 211017 )
      I used to run OpenBSD on my Ultra10, it's now running Gentoo - because I wanted some additional software like latest XFCE and Evolution - that wasn't supported in OpenBSD.

      • Re:Gentoo works as well (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Strange... both of these are in ports.
        • The keyword there is `latest'. Either way, I'm willing to be that compiling both those apps by hand would be trivial.
          • Unfortunately, due to the large number of dependencies of some of these programs, it suspect it would be a pain to do it all by hand.

            I've been looking into getting XFCE built by hand on my powerbook, because it's not supported by Fink (beyond the 3.x branch). It's caused me so much grief that I've temporarily ditched it in favour of IceWM.

            However, simply for a server, there's very few "cuttting edge" programs you'd need to manually build. So in that situation I'd advocate one of the BSD's.

    • Re:when will this happen to sun/sparc hardware? (Score:4, Informative)

      by bplipschitz ( 265300 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:46PM (#9444428)
      just about the only things that run on sparcs/sun hardware is solaris, free|netBSD and debian. (and really old/outdated versions of other distros).

      Maybe eventually, but there is strong support for Sparc64 on Free/Net/OpenBSD. With regular Sparc, you're relegated to Net and OpenBSD [in BSD world], which again still has strong support.

      What's cool about the Sparc64 support, is that the support for different things amongst the BSD's is very different, so you have to really get to know the OS, and choose based upon what you intend to use the machine for.

      For example, I run OpenBSD on both an Ultra1 and an Ultra2, as these are 'desktop' machines [and do some minor fileserving]. I run OpenBSD not for the security, but because they have the best framebuffer support for X. I run FreeBSD on a headless E250 that I use as a workstation file backup machine, because it has more ported applications from which to choose.

      Then there is my lowly mailserver, running NetBSD on a dual CPU SS 20.

      They all perform flawlessly, and are more stable with their respective OS's than with Slowlaris.
      • I run OpenBSD not for the security, but because they have the best framebuffer support for X.

        Wow! This just might be the first comment I've ever seen on /. that explains that OpenBSD is good for something other than routing, and high security...

        You're in the company of around a dozen of people on /. who have actually used it extensively... Congratulations!
    • You can still buy a new sparc machine. The only people that can buy new Alphas are people that have preexisting contracts to buy them.
  • Is Alpha still a current platform? Are any companies still producing Alpha based systems? I'm sure we'll continue to see Alpha on embedded systems, but that has always been NetBSD's forte. Am I correct in this assumption, or have I been cloistered in the IA32 world for too long?

    I don't to relegate Alpha users to second class citizenship, but neither should FreeBSD releases be held up because of bugs on "legacy" hardware.
    • I doubt that you will see much in the way of embedded Alphas. Intel owns the Alpha and really has no reason to push it in the embedded market place.
      In the very low power risc space they have the X-Scale.
      In the low power the have the Pentium-M
      For the eat all the electrons you want and double as a pizza oven you have Xeon and IA-64.
      No real place for the Alpha. Really is a shame it was sold out. DEC Could have been very interesting with the ALPHA they might have been abile to scale from the desktop up to SMP s
    • I think they're still made, but only to satisfy military contracts. They're not current, they just get die shrinks and more cache. They're not bad processors even now, but they cost a fortune and even SPARC is faster now.
  • I would have thought that most alphas would be running 4 or previous - something more proven. Anyone who's that bothered about tier-1 status probably wouldn't be running an unstable release. Do many people use 5 on alphas?
    Losing Tier-1 status may not be that big a deal. AMD64 is tier-1, and there's no gdb or loadable module support (at least not in 5.2.1, I don't know about -CURRENT).

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