Re: HEADSUP: Alpha support is being retired in 7.0

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.

> I like the Alpha architecture and I got the 
>impression that most of the higher level problems like seg-faults in 
>Mozilla on Alpha are caused by dirty programming techniques or bugs in the 
>C compiler related to 64 Bit addressing. Cleaning up such problems would 
>result in better code for the other architectures also. 

Definitely.  This is one reason why the Alpha branch wasn't axed in the
past.  However there are now several other 64-bit architectures so this
is no longer a justification for maintaining the Alpha.  The SPARC64
branch has the added bonus of being a big-endian architecture so it
also detects cases where code assumes little-endian addressing.

-- 
Peter Jeremy