Date: Fri, 19 May 2006 11:41:54 +0200 From: Wilko Bulte <wb@freebie.xs4all.nl> To: Peter Jeremy <peter@vk2pj.dyndns.org>, freebsd-alpha@infopuls.com, alpha@freebsd.org, current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: HEADSUP: Alpha support is being retired in 7.0 Message-ID: <20060519094154.GA10634@freebie.xs4all.nl> In-Reply-To: <20060519082621.GA736@turion.vk2pj.dyndns.org> References: <200605111424.04935.jhb@freebsd.org> <20060518101734.4036.qmail@dachs.cyberlink.ch> <20060519082621.GA736@turion.vk2pj.dyndns.org>
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On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 06:26:22PM +1000, Peter Jeremy wrote.. > On Thu, 2006-May-18 12:17:34 +0200, freebsd-alpha@infopuls.com wrote: > >Of course, I regret that the Alpha branch is not continued in FreeBSD > >development because I intend to use this and some other Alpha boxes that I > >plan to buy for many years. > > As has been said elsewhere in this thread, I don't believe anyone is > overjoyed at the axing of the Alpha branch. Unfortunately, given the > demise of the architecture, enthusiasm for the Alpha has diminished to > the point where it is holding back the FreeBSD project. I'll accept > my share of the responsibility for this - neither of my Alphas are > currently in working condition and I haven't been sufficiently > motivated to repair them, as a result, I haven't been following the > progress of FreeBSD/Alpha for about 18 months. > > AFAIK, FreeBSD/Alpha will continue to be supported for the life of the > 6.x branch - at least another 3 years. After which, you can always > run NetBSD on it. One thing that I have been pondering is that for Alpha you will now have to directly commit things onto RELENG_[56] without going to HEAD first. After all, there is no buildable Alpha support in HEAD anymore. I think this is a first in FreeBSD, which makes it interesting.. > past. However there are now several other 64-bit architectures so this > is no longer a justification for maintaining the Alpha. The SPARC64 Well.. if you just count the problems with unaligned accesses etc I wonder if SPARC64 fills that gap? I just don't know enough about SPARC64 here, mind you. > branch has the added bonus of being a big-endian architecture so it > also detects cases where code assumes little-endian addressing. -- Wilko Bulte wilko@FreeBSD.org
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