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

welcome back ...

[hubertf]

... to NetBSD.

Bread from the bakery,
meat from the butcher,
and multiplatform operating systems from The NetBSD Foundation.

- Hubert

This doesn't mean it's dead

[agent dero]

All this really means is that they will not concentrate their efforts on the Alpha port as much as AMD64, and i386.

It is by no means dead, if you have an Alpha, you can try to help them out ;)

Gentoo works as well

[harikiri]

I used to run OpenBSD on my Ultra10, it's now running Gentoo - because I wanted some additional software like latest XFCE and Evolution - that wasn't supported in OpenBSD.

Re:This is a good thing

[n0dez]

Now they can focus more on i386, amd64 and ia64.

Re:alpha is dead

[johnalex]

We're using a DEC (that's right, the original DEC) Alpha 2100 here to run our credit union software. We've upgraded almost everything that can be upgraded short of adding an additional processor. This unit came in the door in 1994. It's still running as it has for almost 10 years now: 24x7x365.

I've always said, if DEC had hired quality marketing people in addition to quality engineers, the company would still be in business. They designed and built rock-solid stuff.

Re:alpha is dead

[gorodish]

We have 23 DS-10 Alpha boxes that were left over after we retired our old render farm. They are four years old, but still have the horsepower to make dandy network servers (though we run OpenBSD on them). And the SRM console is very powerful and makes them true machine room servers. I can even reset them and cycle power via the serial port, using the RMC (Remote Management Console) feature. They are great workhorse machines. Thanks DEC!

Re:alpha is dead

[timothy]

Re: the DEC business story, you might find the book "The Ultimate Entrepreneur" interesting; it's about Ken Olsen and the rise of DEC. Even more outdated than the link below says, but certain aspects of history, uh, tend not to change :) I found this book in a free-books pile somewhere, and enjoyed it. Olsen, says the book, was a control freak (in a good way) and in particular exacting about packaging / chassis designs.

timothy

(http://www.bitworm.com/detail/0809245590/The_Ul ti mate_Entrepreneur_The_Story_of_Ken_Olsen_and_Digit al_Equipment_Corporation.html)