Slashdot Mirror
OpenBSD's Alpha Support In Trouble
Nimrangul writes "Hours ago Theo de Raadt put out a call for an Alpha CS20, because as of last night OpenBSD no longer has one. The CS20 that died was a build machine and without it further support for the Alpha platform would be nearly impossible. If you have a C320 or other 1U Alpha machine that you would be willing to donate to the project, please respond to the discussion on the misc mailing list."
Last night something went wrong temperature wise in my machine room.
One of the build alphas is now dead.
I think Theo should also ask for aircon. I'm willing to help but 1U boxes tend to get hot, and I see no point in all chipping in for a new Alpha box to see it go pop again in 2 weeks time. Theo, tell us what went wrong and what you've done to fix it or what we can do to help you fix it. Then we can worry about replacing the hardware - otherwise I think it's probably just as well to ask for Alpha hardware and rackspace in a reliable colo as send the hardware back to the same place.
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
That last sentence is wrong!
Native compiling on a [slow] platform doesn't test that "everything works" for that platform, just that the native compiler generates some code on a given model. This is especially relevant for platforms with a diverse range of hardware, including Alpha.
Cross-compiling on a fast platform reduces the turn-around time for providing software to test on slower platforms. (Why wait a week for a build to compile when you cross-compile in an hour?). The NetBSD cross-build framework offers other benefits such as allowing build an entire OS release (including install media) without requiring root privileges or fancy OS support such as loopback disk drivers. More details in my BSDCon 03 talk and build.sh paper.
Either build method does not remove the need for actually testing the resulting build on the variety of hardware available for a given platform. That is a separate and more important issue.
(Why do [AC] fanboys of some operating systems belittle functionality that their OS doesn't currently have, only to about-face and shout to the rooftops when they finally get it?)
it generates a bunch of bits into files... the bits are the same AS LONG AS THE COMPILER IS THE SAME on all systems.
It doesn't run any of these bits so it doesn't NEED to have the build target hardware.
There was a recent thread about cross compiling on OpenbSD misc@. Perhaps this one summarize it nicely :