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

This is a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Energy ought to be put towards platforms that still exist.

Alpha is as dead as a doornail. While RISC may still be flourishing, this pioneer is dead.

Keeping Alpha support around is like keeping Lenin's pickled corpse in a mausoleum. It may invoke feelings of nostalgia, but he's not coming back no matter how hard we wish he would.

Re:This is a good thing

[n0dez]

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

alpha is dead

[konmem]

or dying? On a serious note -- how many people still use Alpha? It is a shame to see such an elegantly designed processor die.

Re:alpha is dead

[revmoo]

Netcraft confirms it! Alpha is....... nevermind

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: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)

Re:alpha is dead

[bugmenot]

Yes, unfortunatly intel destroyed them.
If alpha was in intels posistion now, computers in general would have been much better.

too bad.

Re:alpha is dead

[obirt]

If by destroyed you mean violated their agreement with DEC and copied parts of the chip design of the Alpha into the Pentium II, then yes.

welcome back ...

[hubertf]

... to NetBSD.

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

- Hubert

Re:welcome back ...

[Dahan]

Yup, my thanks to everyone who's worked on NetBSD... It's been running my DEC AlphaPC 164 server for almost 5 years now.

Bright Side of Things

[vga_init]

Hey, there's always VMS! =)

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.

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: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: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.

Tier-1 loss not that big a deal

[hmallett]

I would have thought that most alphas would be running 4 or previous - something more proven. Anyone who's that bothered about tier-1 status probably wouldn't be running an unstable release. Do many people use 5 on alphas?
Losing Tier-1 status may not be that big a deal. AMD64 is tier-1, and there's no gdb or loadable module support (at least not in 5.2.1, I don't know about -CURRENT).