HEADSUP: Alpha support is being retired in 7.0

[Wilko Bulte]

On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 09:23:13AM +0200, Sten Spans wrote..
> On Thu, 11 May 2006, John Baldwin wrote:
> 
> >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.
> 
> A backport of the if_em jumboframe changes would be nice
> for the last few alpha people with gigabit, although I'll
> probably will be able to backport it myself.

I'm more than happy to stick patches into RELENG_6.  I don't think
my GbE switch understands jumbo packets, but I do have em(4) cards 
in my Alpha as you know :)

> /me wanders off, still looking for that elusive alphaserver ds15 :)

Same here :-/

-- 
Wilko Bulte				wilko at FreeBSD.org