After a (somewhat) long discussion in the FreeBSD ‘current@’ and ‘hackers@’ mailing lists concerning the status of KSE in -CURRENT, the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team have decided to drop tier-ness of the alpha port to Tier-2 before 5.3 hits the road. This means, among other things, that 4-STABLE will be the last FreeBSD -STABLE branch for the alpha platform.The email that announced this fall-from-grace, stated that “demotion is not a terminal condition”. However, according to the docs on www.FreeBSD.org, tier-2 platforms “are not supported by the security officer and release engineering teams” and “at the discretion of the toolchain maintainer, they may be supported in the toolchain”. With the upcoming update of binutils/gcc/gdb, the demotion seems rather terminal (at least to my eyes).
The DEC-Compaq-HP alpha processor family had always been in the hearts and minds of those striving to get every tiny bit of extra horsepower out of their hardware — namely, people in industry and academia in need of high-performance computing — and FreeBSD does have well more than a handfull of followers therein. With alpha dieing a slow death and x86-64 rising up as the new reference 64-bit platform, we (FreeBSD/alpha users) are left with the options of either changing our hardware or choosing another OS. Now it’s for time and history to tell which one will prevail.
Unfortunately, the only answer is for someone to step up and support the alpha. If it has dropped to Tier-2, no one has done that yet.
It is really unfortunate… and the UltraSPARC port may follow right behind. Let’s admit it though, HP (and SUN) don’t support these boxes anymore, why should FreeBSD support them?
Well, Alpha is old technology, and I think that this was a good decision. I certainly hope that the developers can focus more on x86 and amd64 now.
OpenVMS is free for hobbyist use: http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/ It has to be one of the most underrated OSs among the geek world. Its clustering support is top notch. You could give it a go. If you just want to run a *nix clone get NetBSD. Their alpha support is much better than FreeBSD’s, and 2.0 rocks.
Well it does make the most sense that they stick to architectures that will be updated and continue to be on sale, the alpha is one the best architectures and the one with the most potential in my view, but theres nothing that can be done, hp and compaq have sealed its fate, always wanted an alpha machine myself
From what I’ve seen, Alpha has been pretty affordable 64-bit hardware from eBay compared to SGI, Sun, or HP, for what was at the time wonderful performaning machines. I have a UP1500 running FreeBSD 5.2, and it is great to use. Alpha always seemed like the second most supported architecture, also. I suppose I”ll start looking at NetBSD.
“. Alpha always seemed like the second most supported architecture, also. I suppose I”ll start looking at NetBSD.”
i suggest you take a look at openbsd instead of netbsd.
speed of growth
linux
openbsd
freebsd
netbsd
How is it possible for oepnbsd to grow faster than freebsd considering the number of developers? Maybe I’m incorrect buy that sounds pretty shanty. Unless you strictly talking about Alpha.
— NetBSD 2.x will rule–
-adapt.
“How is it possible for oepnbsd to grow faster than freebsd considering the number of developers? Maybe I’m incorrect buy that sounds pretty shanty. Unless you strictly talking about Alpha. ”
the key point here is release management. openbsd has a complete distribution release every 6 months. thats a much higher code change adoption that freebsd does. freebsd 5 for example has been there for several months without being marked as stable. its due to the freebsd team being very conservative. not that it is bad or something. openbsd has much tighter control and all that. i will definitely conclude that rate of change in openbsd is higher
@micker
By flynn (IP: —.58.3.237.proxycache.rima-tde.net) – Posted on 2004-06-15 19:54:35
OpenVMS is free for hobbyist use: http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/ It has to be one of the most underrated OSs among the geek world. Its clustering support is top notch. You could give it a go. If you just want to run a *nix clone get NetBSD. Their alpha support is much better than FreeBSD’s, and 2.0 rocks.
It’s a shame folks cant see the post you are refering to. I wonder, is it because I refered to the those that removed further Tier1 support for alpha as Wankers or as Bastards?
Honestly, as a serious FreeBSD user and a RISC workstation fan, this does not bother me. Alpha, unfortunately, is dying, and though buying an EV7z box off of ebay in 5 years will be fun, there just will not be that many of them out there. There dont really seem to be that many 21264 workstations out there now, even compared to something of similar highest-end vintage, like a Sun Ultra 80.
What is of interest to me is better time-to-release for 5-STABLE and support of living 64 bit architectures, and it seems like this may help in those areas.
Not to mention the fact that Tru64, if you can get it, is cool. So all is not lost.
yeah, the alpha is publicaly phasing out as pa-risc.. SPARC is a little different there, you have multiple companies that actually use SPARC.. You have TI in the embedded market, Fujitsu, and sun microsystems.. sun’s roadmap calls for sparc to be around for a long time. so If the SPARC were to die it would die past 2010, so it is worth supporting. Not to mention you can get the very cool alpha chip with tru64 and openvms… which tru64 is also phasing out… use a phasing OS with a phasing chip.
– POWER/PowerPC 64-bit – – MIPS 64-bit (Dead? They are still releasing new machines though) – SPARC 64-bit – ARM 32-bit – x86 32-bit – x86 64-bit – SPARC 64-bit – PowerPC 32-bit….. In my opinion those are the only archetectures that are worth supporting right now.. I’m unaware of SGI’s attitude toward the mips though–they keep releasing machines using it though
I tink youare missing Itanium. It is still quite alive despite not flourishing and being Intels great hope for the future and for higher computing I suspect it will be around for a while. I think that FreeBSD on Itanium is important. I’m not sure about ARM 32 bit. FreeBSD doesn’t lend itself to embedded work does it? Or are there ARM servers that I don’t know about?
oh, and you mentioned SPARC-64 twice.
Why should it not lend it self to being usable in embedded hardware?
How can I conclude from the following statement that OpenBSD’s platform support is advancing faster than that of NetBSD?
“The mac68k port of OpenBSD was derived from NetBSD/mac68k, and it used to support most of the same hardware as NetBSD. Although this port is still being supported, there has been no effort to catch up with recent NetBSD developments.” (m68k)
“Over time, because of a lack of programmer resources and the inability to use NetBSD code, hardware and software support became very outdated.” (alpha)
If I read those quotes, I would think that the OpenBSD platform support heavily depends on the work of the NetBSD people. Therefore I don’t see how you can claim that the OpenBSD platform support is advancing faster than that of NetBSD.
And I don’t see how OpenBSD advancing faster than NetBSD can be such a huge advantage, because NetBSD has quite some things that OpenBSD simply doesn’t have. Think: scalability, SMP, kernel threads, …
Additionally, now that the subject is Alpha, it seems that NetBSD supports more Alpha hardware than OpenBSD, like floppy drives, sound, AlphaStation 500 and 600. So if I had an Alpha computer, I would not have difficulties in choosing the right OS
What the hell? Did you just make those numbers up? I also hope that you aren’t referring to Linux’s growth on the desktop, because that is actually shrinking according to Google Zeitgeist. Please see the thread in the Linux forum for more details.
As a proud user of FreeBSD, I’m happy they are lowering Alpha support to Tier 2 IF that means there will be better support for my Amd64. I’m sure they’re making the right choice.
“What the hell? Did you just make those numbers up? I also hope that you aren’t referring to Linux’s growth on the desktop, because that is actually shrinking according to Google Zeitgeist. Please see the thread in the Linux forum for more details.
”
i havent specified any numbers. i was talking about speed of growth and google zeitgeist is talking about browser access to google.com from linux which is sticking at 1 % rounded off from .98 to 1.465 so its actually growing too/
the key point here is release management. openbsd has a complete distribution release every 6 months. thats a much higher code change adoption that freebsd does. freebsd 5 for example has been there for several months without being marked as stable. its due to the freebsd team being very conservative. not that it is bad or something. openbsd has much tighter control and all that. i will definitely conclude that rate of change in openbsd is higher
Wow. Are you ever off base. The reality of the situation is exactly opposite to what you’ve described.
It is OpenBSD that is the conservative one (how else would they be able to maintain such a reliable release schedual? (not to mention the fact that they are only now adopting things like SMP that FreeBSD has had for years)), and FreeBSD makes ever more large and far reaching changes to their code base (why do you think that it’s still not production worthy after more than three years of development on the 5.x branch?)
You really should think things through a little more before you post. You’ve been wrong before, but man, this time it’s embarrassing. It’s been a while since I’ve seen someone get something so wrong that the complete opposite of what they claimed was true.