Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 09:23:15 -0400 (EDT) From: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> To: Kris Kirby <kris@catonic.net> Cc: freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Alpha 4.x releases (production quality?) Message-ID: <14829.41324.212080.318391@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0010181300550.29907-100000@spaz.huntsvilleal.com> References: <14829.40410.255103.869589@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0010181300550.29907-100000@spaz.huntsvilleal.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Kris Kirby writes: > On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Andrew Gallatin wrote: > > If you can actually manage to get it installed, it is just as stable > > as FreeBSD/i386. Most embarassing problems are in the > > install/bootstrap area. > > Like "shutdown -r now" not rebooting? ;-) Not really, I was more thinking of the problems people seem to have installing 4.1.1. This particular case might be a firmware bug. Multias have ancient firmware. At least shutdown -r now reboots every alpha I have. And I have lots of different alphas. > > If you decide to try it, I'd suggest installing 4.0-release and > > buildworlding your way to -stable. When you do this, copy the > > original (4.0-release) /boot/loader over what installworld installs. > > Does cross-platform compiling work? I've got a K7-850 with resources to > spare, but my Alpha is a Multia! What I did install on it was > 4.1-RELEASE. Building a kernel took as long as my K5/75 as it did on my Multias are not speedy, I'm honestly very surpised it was as fast as your k5/75. Most 2 year old IDE drives have more I/O bandwidth than the multia's main memory system. And producing code for alphas is more difficult than it is for pcs, so gcc takes longer to compile a given chunk of code. But to answer your question, if you've already got 4.1-release installed, I wouldn't worry about it. Heck, you could do a binary upgrade to 4.1.1. Just remember to keep the old /boot/loader around and copy it over top of what the upgrade installs. > Multia (~4000 seconds). I'd like to put it into operation as a little web > server, but I am reminded of comments on this list some time ago amounting > to "It works, but I wouldn't risk using it in production." I'm concerned > that being an Alpha that it might be more prone to security risk since the > majority of effort is directed at i386. Buffer Overflows and all... I actually feel better about alphas than i386s. there are less canned exploits for alphas. If an MI hole exists in FreeBSD, an i386 is much more likely to be cracked than an alpha simply because there are more PCs out there and more people working on exploits. However, I would never put a multia into production running any OS. They're notoriously unreliable, hardware-wise. They were designed to be glorified X terminals, not servers. Drew To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?14829.41324.212080.318391>