HEADSUP: Alpha support is being retired in 7.0

[Paul V. Bolotoff]

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/
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