Re: The State of Alpha Linux
Hi Matt! Matt Turner wrote: [ ... ] We're all subscribed to this list because we use a dying platform. You think it's dying? :-P We do what we can to keep it going, but in recent months the State of Alpha Linux has been deteriorating at an accelerated rate. Let me outline some issues facing us today: 1.We have no glibc/Alpha maintainer [1] What can we do here? Who can take over this job. What skills are required to take over the job? How much time does one have to spend to do the job? If someone would volunteer, whom does he or she have to contact? I mailed glibc's libc-ports mailing list recently about this. http://sources.redhat.com/ml/libc-ports/2009-01/msg2.html Gentoo's Mike Frysinger was the only one to respond. For me it's fine to have it in ports, if that only means it's not actively tested. I can understand it will then not hold up a release. It's up to *us* to take over the job of testing and fixing. That's fine. But Mike also stated, that he doesn't know who is going to merge the patches... But this is the most important part! If you think there's a chance you might be able to take over the job, I encourage you to mail libc-ports, as I don't know the answers myself. As I said, since I don't know what skills one must have, I'm not sure if I might be able to take over the job. But I'm willing to try, of course. 2.Kernel development for Alpha is comatose I do see some commits from time to time... Well, not much enhancements of course... But there would be a few things that should be ported from x86 to alpha... 3.We can't run modern X.Org [2] At the moment. I guess it's just a fair bit of work and then we would be able to run modern xorg. It's actually just one non-trivial bug (we hope). Kernel bug 10839. Also, see http://alphalinux.org/wiki/index.php/Bugs_to_watch It depends on what we want. If we just want a fallback method in libpciaccess, I think it shouldn't be too much work - for someone who knows how to do it... I've read that a fallback method would be unacceptable slow. That might be true, but would give us at least the chance to *have* it. A more robust and faster method - of course - would be appreciated, but that actually seems to be the non-trivial thing... To make things worse, for such a small group of users, we're much too segregated and disorganized. For instance, how many (of the only four) Gentoo/Alpha maintainers are subscribed to this list? Debian/Alpha? I don't know if any other Alpha distribution maintainer is subscribed here, but I do include debian-alpha m/l now and klausman (I think he's one of the Gentoo Alpha maintainers). Yes, klausmann subscribed to this list after I told him to recently. :) Great :-) How many realized we were without a glibc maintainer? That we can't use X.Org 7.4? I can say, I did. If this trend continues, we will completely first lose X.Org support. AFAIK, Ivan works on this, isn't he? Well, he has in the past. According to marc.info, after a 6 month absence on LKML, he sent a message yesterday. This absence also coincides with the time he stopped responding to kernel bug 10893. I guess he has a real job as well :-) I even had an X.Org developer tell me he didn't care [about Alpha support] when I pinged him about an Alpha bug he had originally filed [3]! What is the problem for the developers? They don't have alphas they can access? We can help in this case. No, I don't think this is the problem at all. jcristau, the developer who told me he didn't care, has at least one alpha. OK. None of the top tier X.Org developers seem to care at all about alpha. David Airlie told me he thought some of the problems we'd experience on Alpha with kernel modesetting would be very similar to problems on the Itanium, which he has to support. So he would be willing to put a little bit of effort into supporting Alpha, since the heavy lifting would already be done for Itanium. Oh yes... Lot of Itanium work helped me already :-) We'll later lose glibc support. As it stands now, Alpha isn't even in the main tree [4]. I'm not sure what version Debian ships, but Gentoo is 3 versions behind at 2.6.1. Newer than that and the test suite causes a hard lock [5]. How much longer is it going to be before 2.6 is incompatible with the latest version and we begin to lose the ability to use other modern software? 2.9 runs fine and I'm trying to keep up 2 date with trunk to find bugs as early as possible and patch it so it works. Also I'm using Gentoo and Debian patches and post bugs in glibc bugzilla. So from my perspective glibc is not a problem. gcc (as of 4.3.x) isn't a problem as well. From time to time there are build problems, but normally easy to fix and I 'zilla them... The real problem is that nothing is going to get better in regards to glibc, it's only going to get worse as long as we have no upstream support. That's correct, it's not going to get any better... Unfortunately, some
Re: The State of Alpha Linux
Oliver Falk wrote: Matt Turner wrote: The State of Alpha Linux We're all subscribed to this list because we use a dying platform. You think it's dying? :-P Way back, on the day that I heard that Compaq had bought DEC, I knew in my heart that the beginning of the end had arrived for Alpha. Yep, the Alpha is definitely a dying platform. I have been running an Alpha XP1000 at home for the last three or four years (ever since it was discarded by my workplace) and it has served me well and has done all that I asked of it (a multimedia machine with a PVR card for recording analague television and playback of recorded MPEG files and DVDs). I am impressed by all that this nine year old computer has managed to do. But last year I finally splashed out on digital TV and bought a DVB-T card. The problem is that digital TV in New Zealand is using MPEG4 (i.e. h.264 and AAC codecs) and the Alpha cannot decode that in real time (not even if I were to implement hand coded assembly using MVI instructions in libavcodec -- h.264 is simply too computationally intensive to decode). Buying a recent graphics card (I actually found one with a pci bus!) that has hardware video decoding doesn't solve the problem. I was hoping the graphics drivers for Xorg might be soon be close to providing realtime hardware decoding of video, but I have realised they are nowhere near it, and, in any case, I can't run the new graphics card on the Alpha, apparently due to the lack of Linux kernel facilities on Alpha that has been mentioned earlier in this thread. I admit I am losing hope that these problems will be fixed. No doubt I should be more grateful for whatever crumbs fall the way of the Alpha, but the paucity of digestable particular matter has left me somewhat hungry lately. Thus I am considering giving up on my Alpha, and may have to eat my hat as I consider purchasing an Intel based computer for the first time in my 25 years of using computers. This is despite my seriously negative (admittedly bigoted) opinion of Intel processors. Sorry to be negative, but sometimes one has to be pragmatic, and if I am finally going to receive and watch digital TV, it seems it cannot be with my Alpha. Cheers Michael. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-alpha-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: The State of Alpha Linux
On Thu, 2009-01-08 at 11:32 -0500, Matt Turner wrote: No, I don't think this is the problem at all. jcristau, the developer who told me he didn't care, has at least one alpha. I used to have (remote) access to an alpha. I don't anymore (other than Debian's port machine). Cheers, Julien -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-alpha-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: The State of Alpha Linux
Uwe Schindler wrote: I have been running an Alpha XP1000 at home for the last three or four years (ever since it was discarded by my workplace) and it has served me well and has done all that I asked of it (a multimedia machine with a PVR card for recording analague television and playback of recorded MPEG files and DVDs). I am impressed by all that this nine year old computer has managed to do. The same here, too. I was inpressed, that an old AlphaStation 500/500 was (and is still) able to handle the needs of a modern computer. The only problem today is the graphics problems with X.org. But for me this is not the problem, as my AlphaStation is running as server only (and the console works perfect). Yes, I am considering that option too. Keeping the Alpha as server and TV (both analogue and digital) receiver/streamer. It does that much very well. The given AlphaStation machine is perfectly booting from a SCSI ZIP drive (containing /boot) just to have a SRM-able boot drive instead of the 3,5 disk drive (I did not want to have a always spinning small hard drive for booting). This handles over to a cheap 10$ SATA (!!!) controller having large SATA disks Yes, I also have a cheap SATA controller with SATA discs (including the CD/DVD drive) installed. Nice. Better throughput than the on board Qlogic SCSI. But I still have one SCSI disc in the system for no other purpose than to boot it - I hadn't thought of using a ZIP drive to enable me to remove that last SCSI disc. I also had a cheap USB 2.0/Firewire card in it but that was removed to make room for the DVB-T tuner card since all PCI slots are filled. I currently use the eSATA port to connect to my external drive when needed for backup and file transfer. But if I turned it into a server only I could remove the quality surround sound card and reinsert the USB 2.0/Firewire card. Then I would only need to purchase a new computer to be the media playback centre. Cheers Michael. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-alpha-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: The State of Alpha Linux
Matt Turner wrote: Right. But for some mysterious reasons, Alphas are still very expensive and if you put one on ebay, you will sell it. I attribute this to sellers who try to hit the lottery. That is, they hope that a corporate server with no back up fails and someone with access to the company's expense account spends 7000 GBP (as I was recently quoted for an ES47) to get a replacement immediately. I do feel the need to point out that this is not always the case - you can also find some great deals. Evidence the DS-20L I got on ebay for $100 (it's no ES47, but it's nice nonetheless!) -- you just need a little - or a lot - of patience. Cheers, Brian Szymanski -- Brian Szymanski -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-alpha-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: The State of Alpha Linux
On 8 Jan 2009, at 4:32 pm, Matt Turner wrote: I attribute this to sellers who try to hit the lottery. That is, they hope that a corporate server with no back up fails and someone with access to the company's expense account spends 7000 GBP (as I was recently quoted for an ES47) to get a replacement immediately. I can attest to that - we just got rid of a cluster of 8 ES40s to a research outfit that (for whatever reason) still hasn't made any effort to move off the platform. Of course, such people are running Tru64 or VMS; it's child's play to move services on Linux on Alpha to some other architecture. That's why AlphaServer resale values are good - lots of Tru64 and VMS customers who don't want to move to Itanium. Tru64 customers (such as we were) are doubly hit - not only do they not have their architecture any more, but of course they don't have their OS either, and if you've made heavy use of Tru64-specific features, such as TruCluster or AdvFS, then you're not in a happy place. TruCluster in particular is hard to replace - HA features for Linux do not work in the same way, or provide the same features, and porting applications to, say, heartbeat, is not trivial in the least. We bit the bullet and began migrating to Linux on x86 about 6 years ago, pretty much as soon as the HP/Compaq merger happened. The writing was on the wall. But I suspect a lot of customers drank the HP Koolade and believed them when they said that AdvFS and TruCluster would be ported to HP-UX. Regards, Tim -- The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-alpha-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: The State of Alpha Linux
On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 08:25:38AM -0500, Brian Szymanski wrote: Matt Turner wrote: Right. But for some mysterious reasons, Alphas are still very expensive and if you put one on ebay, you will sell it. I attribute this to sellers who try to hit the lottery. That is, they hope that a corporate server with no back up fails and someone with access to the company's expense account spends 7000 GBP (as I was recently quoted for an ES47) to get a replacement immediately. I do feel the need to point out that this is not always the case - you can also find some great deals. Evidence the DS-20L I got on ebay for $100 (it's no ES47, but it's nice nonetheless!) -- you just need a little - or a lot - of patience. Heh! Having a benefactor is also useful. I got my PWS 433au from a developer friend who had more need of a cantilever shelf for his rack than the Alpha. So, $29 and a 45-minute drive out to his remote site later, and I became the proud owner of a lightly-used $10,000 (according to the original invoice) system, including installation media and licensing for DEC UNIX. What is the system being used for these days? It's the reliable experimental system in my menagerie... Trying out new kernel.org kernels generally happens first on the Alpha. It's also my IPv6 gateway. I do masochistic things like run FreeNX on it (using it from my day job as I type this), and am generally interested in anything that improves the usability/viability of the platform for modern purposes. The reason I scrapped DEC UNIX for Linux in the first place was that I wanted a modern web browser *with* Java support. The latest firefox beta works just fine, and the Java support is sufficient for the few web sites I visit that require it. As far as support for the platform, I consider myself erratic in terms of availability. Real life intrudes all too frequently :-(. However, I *do* seem to find the time to investigate and fix bugs that affect me personally. Odd thing, that :-). -- Bob Tracy | I was a beta tester for dirt. They never did r...@frus.com | get all the bugs out. - Steve McGrew on /. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-alpha-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Re: The State of Alpha Linux
On 8 Jan 2009, at 4:32 pm, Matt Turner wrote: I attribute this to sellers who try to hit the lottery. That is, they hope that a corporate server with no back up fails and someone with access to the company's expense account spends 7000 GBP (as I was recently quoted for an ES47) to get a replacement immediately. I can attest to that - we just got rid of a cluster of 8 ES40s to a research outfit that (for whatever reason) still hasn't made any effort to move off the platform. Of course, such people are running Tru64 or VMS; it's child's play to move services on Linux on Alpha to some other architecture. That's why AlphaServer resale values are good - lots of Tru64 and VMS customers who don't want to move to Itanium. Tru64 customers (such as we were) are doubly hit - not only do they not have their architecture any more, but of course they don't have their OS either, and if you've made heavy use of Tru64-specific features, such as TruCluster or AdvFS, then you're not in a happy place. TruCluster in particular is hard to replace - HA features for Linux do not work in the same way, or provide the same features, and porting applications to, say, heartbeat, is not trivial in the least. We bit the bullet and began migrating to Linux on x86 about 6 years ago, pretty much as soon as the HP/Compaq merger happened. The writing was on the wall. But I suspect a lot of customers drank the HP Koolade and believed them when they said that AdvFS and TruCluster would be ported to HP-UX. That is edifying. I've noticed that in large organizations, there is often a philosophy: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. This could also mean that if it ain't broke, break it, but that's another matter. At my recent job at a phone company, it was not terribly long ago that we got rid of the last vestiges of OS/2 (I mean in one organization; for all I know it may still be deployed elsewhere). Anyway, I can definitely see that while it can be a reasonable philosophy at times, it can ultimately be more bother than it's worth. If Tru64 is the reason why Alpha hardware on ebay is sometimes so pricey (though, I bet you'll see that listings with high opening bids get relisted over and over for months on end), then I would expect that PA-RISC hardware would sell for much less; HP-UX runs on Itanium. Anyway, as has been mentioned, just because some sellers expect a fortune for Alpha hardware doesn't mean you can't get good deals if you are patient. I got my XP1000 for $300 about three years ago. As others have mentioned, it's quite adequate for my purposes, serving media files; the Silicon Image SATA controller works fine, I get excellent NFS performance from it. I don't expect to transcode movies with it; I have another computer for that. I kind of like having a piece of history which is actually useful to me. But, I guess I wouldn't be heartbroken if the Alpha port comes to an end. It works now, so if it ain't broke... I may be using it for a while. Now if I could just get it to boot from compact flash... I like the zip drive idea someone mentioned though... I have an old MO drive, maybe I'll try that. All of my old SCSI disks sound sort of like jet engines. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-alpha-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
RE: Re: The State of Alpha Linux
As others have mentioned, it's quite adequate for my purposes, serving media files; the Silicon Image SATA controller works fine, I get excellent NFS performance from it. I don't expect to transcode movies with it; I have another computer for that. I kind of like having a piece of history which is actually useful to me. But, I guess I wouldn't be heartbroken if the Alpha port comes to an end. It works now, so if it ain't broke... I may be using it for a while. Now if I could just get it to boot from compact flash... I like the zip drive idea someone mentioned though... I have an old MO drive, maybe I'll try that. All of my old SCSI disks sound sort of like jet engines. I tried to boot the Alphastation 500/500 from a Compact Flash before using the SCSI ZIP drive. The problem was that this machine has no IDE controller, so CF cards are of no use per default. I tried an SCSI-PATA converter (ACARD AEC-7720UW) combined with an CF-to-PATA adaptor. The SCSI converter was detected as a SCSI disk from SRM with the name of the CF drive, but it was not able to boot from it (some IO errors occurred). Another flash disk with PATA socket (TRANSCEND IDE FLASH MODULE) had the same IO problems. Booting from a real PATA hard disk worked through this interface, but this was not what I wanted. The Linux Qlogic driver was also able to use the CF card / Transcend module on the SCSI-PATA converter, but SRM was not happy with it - not so nice :( But the ZIP drive I had somewhere did the trick: No spinning, no power consumption when not used and SRM can boot from it. Uwe -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-alpha-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
