HEADSUP: Alpha support is being retired in 7.0

[Phil Brennan]

Please read that article carefully. Note the use of "unless" before
that paragraph, and "imaginary" afterwards.

On 5/15/06, Rafael Ruiz <gandano at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
> In this paper says that Chinese military works on their own cloned Alpha EV8
> / EV9 processors, and they running COSIX (Chinese Tru64 UNIX whose source
> code Compaq gave to the China sometime ago, plus EV8 etc plans that might
> have leaked out of the US).
>
> Please, see http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4266
>
> Rafa
>
> 2006/5/15, Paul V. Bolotoff <walter at alasir.com>:
> >
> > That's sad very much. However, the architecture may be revived sooner or
> > later. The instruction set is free, and most original patents of DEC are
> > expired by this moment. Thanks to DEC, the architecture and its hardware
> > implementations are well-documented. There are open-source operating
> > systems, compilers, assemblers and other development tools available, so
> > it's a matter of time for some enterprise to pick everything up and blow a
> > new life into the architecture. We'll see what we shall see.
> >
> > By the way, the Alpha processors have never had integer division
> > implemented in hardware. Not a drawback though, because it's a relatively
> > complicated instruction. It takes an advanced computational logic and dozens
> > of cycles to complete execution anyway (about one bit per clock cycle). To
> > throw an example in, Athlon64-family processors can do that in 42 cycles for
> > 32-bit operands or in 74 cycles for 64-bit ones. Finally, it isn't an easy
> > task for hardware engineers to get it pipelined properly...
> >
> > PVB
> >
> > On Thu, 11 May 2006 14:24 , John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> sent:
> >
> > >Alpha was the first non-x86 port that was added to FreeBSD, and as such
> > it has
> > >greatly aided the efforts to keep FreeBSD from being too i386-centric.
> > >However, recently the Alpha port has not had any active development or
> > >maintenance.  As a result, the quality of the Alpha releases that the
> > Project
> > >provides are not on par with other supported architectures and is in fact
> > >degrading.  Unfortunately, as an architecture it has also been killed by
> > its
> > >creator.
> > >
> > >After considering all of this, it is time to part with Alpha for 7.0 and
> > >beyond.  At this time it is still planned to provide 6.x releases for
> > >FreeBSD/alpha.  The code will still be around in CVS history if someone
> > >suddenly shows up and fixes a bunch of bugs and/or the architecture is
> > >revived.  Users with Alpha systems are welcome to use existing releases
> > of
> > >FreeBSD/alpha or another BSD such as NetBSD/alpha.  We would still like
> > to
> > >see bug fixes for FreeBSD/alpha on 6.x so that the final release is
> > solid.
> > >
> > >--
> > >John Baldwin jhb at FreeBSD.org>  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
> > >"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > freebsd-alpha at freebsd.org mailing list
> > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-alpha
> > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-alpha-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
> >
>
>
>
> --
> --
>
> Rafa.
> Alpha back to life.
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