HEADSUP: Alpha support is being retired in 7.0

[Wilko Bulte]

On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 06:26:22PM +1000, Peter Jeremy wrote..
> On Thu, 2006-May-18 12:17:34 +0200, freebsd-alpha at infopuls.com wrote:
> >Of course, I regret that the Alpha branch is not continued in FreeBSD 
> >development because I intend to use this and some other Alpha boxes that I 
> >plan to buy for many years.
> 
> As has been said elsewhere in this thread, I don't believe anyone is
> overjoyed at the axing of the Alpha branch.  Unfortunately, given the
> demise of the architecture, enthusiasm for the Alpha has diminished to
> the point where it is holding back the FreeBSD project.  I'll accept
> my share of the responsibility for this - neither of my Alphas are
> currently in working condition and I haven't been sufficiently
> motivated to repair them, as a result, I haven't been following the
> progress of FreeBSD/Alpha for about 18 months.
> 
> AFAIK, FreeBSD/Alpha will continue to be supported for the life of the
> 6.x branch - at least another 3 years.  After which, you can always
> run NetBSD on it.

One thing that I have been pondering is that for Alpha you will now have to
directly commit things onto RELENG_[56] without going to HEAD first.

After all, there is no buildable Alpha support in HEAD anymore.

I think this is a first in FreeBSD, which makes it interesting..

> past.  However there are now several other 64-bit architectures so this
> is no longer a justification for maintaining the Alpha.  The SPARC64

Well.. if you just count the problems with unaligned accesses etc
I wonder if SPARC64 fills that gap?  I just don't know enough about
SPARC64 here, mind you.

> branch has the added bonus of being a big-endian architecture so it
> also detects cases where code assumes little-endian addressing.

-- 
Wilko Bulte				wilko at FreeBSD.org