future for FBSD on alpha

[Wilko Bulte]

Quoting Dieter, who wrote on Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 10:30:01PM +0100 ..
> > I wonder how many people run FBSD on alpha.
> > According to bsdstats.org very few - less than 5 boxes.
> > There must be more.
> 
> There are lots of BSD machines that bsdstats.org doesn't
> know about.

Indeed.

> > like myself, are keen to see FBSD supported on alpha
> > for say 1-3 more years. If yes, we might be able to lobby
> > ports maintainers not to drop support for alpha ports.
> 
> I might be interested in switching from Net to Free, but if
> support is going away that would be a bad idea.  1-3 years

In all reality FreeBSD on Alpha is with one foot in the grave.
After FreeBSD-6.x goes EOL things are dead.

It would have been better (read: it would have made survivability
of the Alpha-port a lot better) if people had voiced their interest/support
a bit earlier.. 

Regardless, it is water under the bridge now.

> isn't very long.  This is part of a larger problem.  NetBSD
> is also dropping support for arches.  People don't want to
> support things like uucp or usenet any more.  Anything more
> than 5 nanoseconds old just isn't considered cool.  Even if
> the replacements are far worse, which is often the case.
> What are we supposed to do with older boxes?  Some applications
> that don't require the latest fast hardware, like firewalls,
> still require support and security fixes.  Throwing machines
> into the landfill isn't very green.

True. On the other hand, the power consumption of the average / current
Alpha is not exactly green either.  I am not running mine regularly, only
when I build releases/snapshots.

-- 
Wilko Bulte		wilko at FreeBSD.org