future for FBSD on alpha

[John Baldwin]

On Friday 01 August 2008 09:47:30 am Dieter wrote:
> > Alpha support is gone from the cvs (well.. svn now) repository for 
anything
> > newer than RELENG_6.  If you follow the cvs/svn commit messages you will
> > have seen that.  
> 
> Do you mean that someone took the time to go through and edit out
> support for Alpha?

Yes.  I did the actual deed in the kernel.  I am an Alpha fan myself and have 
worked on it in the past (it was the first arch besides i386 to get SMPng 
support for example, and I worked on the DMA issues and got them fixed (I 
believe) just in time for 6.3).  However, many other developers were not 
willing to expend effort on updating Alpha bits.  It didn't help that they 
couldn't get people to test changes (such as changes to the Linux compat 
stuff and no one on alpha@ would test the patches).  Also, the DMA issues on 
6.x with ata(4) basically killed the Alpha ports cluster (that and some 
hardware issues).  Due to all of these things Alpha was retired from 
7.0-CURRENT.

-- 
John Baldwin