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Date:      Tue, 02 Jun 1998 19:15:33 -0700
From:      "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
To:        Jeffrey Hsu <hsu@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        freebsd-alpha@hub.freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: future of slpha port 
Message-ID:  <11763.896840133@time.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 02 Jun 1998 18:18:14 PDT." <199806030118.SAA22587@hub.freebsd.org> 

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> FreeBSD.  I think the time wasn't right for FreeBSD to accept
> another architecture port.  In any case, I got two loaner units,

I think you're right about that.  It was a great shame, but
the timing just wasn't there.  Not your fault you were simply
ahead of your time. :-)

> the port.  A darn shame too, as I had made great progress and was about
> to integrate the NetBSD pieces into FreeBSD.  It just about broke
> my heart when this project ended.

Well that's a real bummer and I wish I'd known more about the amount
of effort you were putting in since, from my very remote perspective
on things at time, it just looked like something you and Terry were
doing very casually - kinda of an afterschool hack project or
something.  I never realized you'd gone so far as to try and demo it
before DEC or anything like that - much of your posting is new news to
me.  Not that I necessarily could have made a difference, but I might
have tried harder to intervene with Digital and get hardware from them
as I later did when I deemed the time more "right" to add an extra
architecture to FreeBSD's stable (and even then, I was probably about
4-6 months too early :-).

I'm really not doing a _whole_ lot with this Durango box, and it's
even faster than the machines that the others (Warner, Doug, David)
got from DEC, would this project be something you'd be interested in
reviving (especially now that you've at least got folks like Doug and
John as substantial co-contributors) if you had some hardware to use
again?

I'd need some sort of access to it again when it came time to actually
build a FreeBSD/alpha CD, of course, but I'm really not using it for
much more than sending John B. lots of mysterious build problem
reports these days and I'd be happy to hand it over to you.  It's also
got an ideal configuration for porting: NetBSD 1.3.2 (with X and a
decent 4MB Matrox gfx card for sitting in front of) sits on one 4GB
drive and "FreeBSD" in whatever experimental state sits on another 4GB
drive.  Both environments work well enough that I've been able to use
one for resurrecting the other when something bad happened to it and
the SRM bios makes it easy to boot either drive.

Speaking of unused Alphas, what are David G. and Warner doing with
their own Miata boxes these days? :-)

- Jordan

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