Alpha Relegated To FreeBSD's Tier 2

flynn_nrg writes "Scott Long, from the release engineering team, has sent this message to the freebsd-alpha mailing list:'The day has finally come to demote FreeBSD/Alpha to tier-2 status. While I'm sure that this will come as a disappointment to many, the simple truth is that there is no longer enough community interest nor developer interest to fix critical bugs and assist in the development of new features. We've struggled with this for several years, and it's time to set the proper expectations before we enter 5-STABLE.'" (Read on for the rest of the announcement.)

"Being Tier-2 does not mean that Alpha support will actively be removed from the tree. It does, however, mean that ISO images might not be produced for upcoming releases, pre-compiled packages might not be produced and more (in fact, this already stopped several weeks ago), and future security advisories might not be issued for it. This only applies to FreeBSD 5.3 and beyond; existing alpha releases are still supported by the security team according to their schedule, and future 4.x erratas and releases will still support it also. Demotion is also not a terminal condition. If in the future there is an renewed interest and the existing problems can be fixed, it can be re-considered for tier-1.

Alpha was a very important platform for FreeBSD. It paved the way both for 64-bit cleanliness and for being able to support multiple architectures. It was also a nice and refreshing architecture in a world of bland and hackish i386 systems. Thanks to Doug Rabson for porting to it in the first place and thanks to everyone who supported it afterwards.

The Release Engineering Team"

Comments

Re:alpha is dead

[isthisthingon]

Uhhh. I do. :-) We have two Alpha boxen running BSD for a variety of purposes. They're brutally dependable and really just plain fun to work with. The SRM BIOS is more like a shell than a BIOS in the sense that most people are familar with. For someone familar with Unix, it makes so much sense--no goofy menu/submenu systems like most i386 BIOSes to go hunting through for the setting you're trying to change.

We had a situation where a cooling unit failed and a couple of RAID cards, drives, RAM, and what not fried in some of our i386 boxes, but the Alphas (knock wood) have never missed a beat even after that.

I SOOO wish there was a bigger call for 'em in the marketplace, these two servers are among the finest pieces of engineering I've ever encountered. Really. They're great. But, alas! Alphas got trounced by Intel. :-|

Sigh. Sad day.

Re:Gentoo works as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange... both of these are in ports.

Re:when will this happen to sun/sparc hardware?

[bplipschitz]

just about the only things that run on sparcs/sun hardware is solaris, free|netBSD and debian. (and really old/outdated versions of other distros).

Maybe eventually, but there is strong support for Sparc64 on Free/Net/OpenBSD. With regular Sparc, you're relegated to Net and OpenBSD [in BSD world], which again still has strong support.

What's cool about the Sparc64 support, is that the support for different things amongst the BSD's is very different, so you have to really get to know the OS, and choose based upon what you intend to use the machine for.

For example, I run OpenBSD on both an Ultra1 and an Ultra2, as these are 'desktop' machines [and do some minor fileserving]. I run OpenBSD not for the security, but because they have the best framebuffer support for X. I run FreeBSD on a headless E250 that I use as a workstation file backup machine, because it has more ported applications from which to choose.

Then there is my lowly mailserver, running NetBSD on a dual CPU SS 20.

They all perform flawlessly, and are more stable with their respective OS's than with Slowlaris.

Re:Bright Side of Things

[Just Some Guy]

That went right over your head. Ken Olsen, the President of DEC, made those comments in 1984. It's kind of a "640K is enough for anybody" sort of thing, except that Mr. Olsen actually said this.

I thought it was pretty funny and relevant, personally.

Re:Is Alpha still current technology?

[ArbitraryConstant]

I think they're still made, but only to satisfy military contracts. They're not current, they just get die shrinks and more cache. They're not bad processors even now, but they cost a fortune and even SPARC is faster now.