Recycling Vintage Alphas with Debian

robstah writes: "Vintage Alpha based systems, such as the DECstation are often available going cheap at auctions or free from a skip as companies 'upgrade' to PCs. As many goverments now want to prevent computers from ending up in landfill one solution is for us geeks to recycle. How? Installing Debian of course. Debian Planet has a great article on installing Debian on vintage Alphas."

Comments

What about the BSDs?

[evilviper]

I know everyone's sick of hearing that the BSDs out-do Linux, but on non-intel hardware the situation is really quite exaggerated.

The Linux benefits of commercial software (Corel, Real, Sun) don't apply to non-x86 architectures, and the huge flock of Linux developers are working on the i386 development... The other platforms are a hacky afterthought. Meanwhile, the BSDs are no different from i386, to VAX, to Alpha, to Sparc, to MVE.

So does anyone have one good reason to run Linux on non-i386 hardware (not that the reasons to run it on x86 hardware are good) ;-).

Death of the alpha

[mcelrath]

The alpha is dying slowly. I've been running a homebuilt LX164 board (533MHz 21164) for almost 4 years now.

As others have pointed out the 2.4 kernel series has been painful on alpha. This is symptomatic of the fact that the alpha/linux community has died, completely. The two big alpha sites, Alphalinux (referenced in the article), and Alpha News have disappeared. I've been checking almost daily for months. In the last few months I've had a very hard time finding packages. I installed redhat 4 years ago, after a painful wrestling with the pre-release debian of the day. Now redhat 7.2 for alpha is still not out yet, despite the fact that it's been out for i386 since the beginning of October. Redhat sees the writing on the wall too. Their rawhide likewise hasn't seen a new package in a good while. Now I wish I had tried harder with Debian.

I've always hand-installed a lot of packages, but lately, since I can't find binary updates to redhat at all, I've been compiling more and more by hand. And lots of them don't compile. 64-bit cleanness is not something most programmers do by default. (hint: do not use long unless you really know what you're doing!)

It is ironic that in this day where everyone is anticipating the next great 64-bit chip (x86-64/Itanic), I am contemplating moving back to the 32-bit world, after using 64 bits for 4 years, because maintaining it is becoming a chore. DEC/Compaq/HP has really shot themselves in the foot. Between all their mergers and questionable "roadmap", they've alienated their fans, supporters, customers, employees, and even the Hewlett family. Their engineers left for AMD (and you wondered why the K7 was so much faster than the K6 -- buy Athlons!) their compiler guys and patents left for Intel (boycott Intel!), and there's little left of the original vision.

So all you tinkerers out there, I encourage you to buy up all the surplus Miata's you can find! And help the plight of Linux/Alpha and 64-bit clean code across the OSS landscape! Because 64-bit processors are going to become more prevalent, not less, and the world needs people on 64-bit machines to test stuff! (only about 5% of the packages I run into don't compile and run out of the box on alpha/linux -- but those 5% need to be fixed!) And everyone buy a USB PCI card for it too, because the current USB drivers suck! They can hang my kernel.

Oh, and an alpha makes a great firewall/router since all the script-kiddie buffer overflow hacks don't work. (all the script kiddies use buffer overflow attacks that insert x86 code onto the stack...this obviously doesn't work on alpha) A little bit of security through obscurity can help. But don't neglect real security!

--Bob

Lessons learned from my SmartAlpha Station A10

[Thagg]

I've been a fan of the Alpha chip since its debut in the February, 1993 Communications of the ACM back in 1990. Alpha was the great hope, a new chip designed from the ground up as a scientific and technical powerhouse. I had read Darryll Strauss's great article about harnessing 166 433 MHz Alphas toward the production of Titanic, and that only whet my appetite further. When I read that Samsung was going to be pushing Alpha workstations, I exercised my most persuasive writing skills and requested a machine for development, with the idea that it might be used to further the use of Alphas in visual effects work.

Shockingly, about three months later, a battered old SmartAlpha Station A10 showed up on my doorstep. I suppose you can tell a workstation from a desktop machine by the gauge of sheet metal, this thing weighs about 50 lbs. At the time I was still under the influence of NT, so I ported all of our code over to NT on the Alpha. It wasn't that hard, but it wasn't that rewarding either. The rest of our shop is SGI machines, and, well, NT isn't Unix.

Then I decided to run Linux on the box. I ordered Red Hat 5.2 from CheapBytes. 5.2 was the latest Red Hat release for Alpha at the time, although they were shipping 6.0 for X86 machines.

We ported all of our SGI software to the Alpha, and used it for a couple of movies, most noteably Woman on Top . We did some ray tracing using Larry Gritz's BMRT for some of the scenes in the movie, where the power of the Alpha was well used.

After that, I took the machine home, and used it as my home computer until I got a laptop -- and it's been off since then. As promised by the title, here are the lessons learned.

Pro:

Alphas are significantly more finicky about floating point exceptions than the other machines we were using at the time. We found a lot of bugs in our code due to the fact that applications would crash on the Alpha rather than just silently generating bad results.

There are many benefits to using multiple architectures when developing code. It keeps you much more honest. It forces you to keep your build trees in good shape.

Alpha is a 64-bit machine, and it was my first exposure to the fact that long != int. We'll all find this out eventually, sooner is better than later.

Cons:

Alphas are outcasts. That was true three years ago when we got the machine, and it has become dramatically more true now. Finding a decent web browser, for instance, was a challenge. In general, the avalanche of tools that makes Linux so pleasant and productive dries up to a trickle when you look for Alpha tools.

It's very common that programs that you download source for don't quite compile under Alpha. It's not really the fault of those programmers, of course -- they don't have Alpha machines, typically, to test the installation on.

Alphas are just expensive boxes. They will never compete on a MIPS/$ basis. This was true even when they were many times as fast as the Intel chips, and it's becoming more and more true.

Finally, persuing oddball architectures is just typically not a cost-productive way to spend one's time. Of course, I say that -- and I'd sooner die than ever use a Microsoft product :)

thad