Alpha Source Code?

[Sergey Tikhonov]

I would like to say my "THANK YOU" too and agree with Mike, that right 
now other ports
help the Alpha more than Alpha port could help them.

 From my experience trying to build FC2 on Alpha was really painfull.
Building the FC3 right now is much easier.

Hoover, Tony wrote:

>I personally would like to say "Thank You" to Mike, the rest of RedHat, and
>every other company that has been able to build a viable business model out
>of Open Source software.  The benefit that you all bring to the table
>affects everyone who is using the software.
>
>Also I want to thank Mike Barnes and everyone else working on AlphaCore, for
>their "amateur" ( for-the-love-of-it ) effort.
>
>Again THANK YOU. 
>
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Tony Hoover, Network Administrator 
>KSU - Salina, College of Technology & Aviation
>(785) 826-2660
>
>"Don't Blend in..."
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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>>Since AMD64 can mask a multitude of 32bit-x86 architecture dependent 
>>problems, one assumes that the "core" is anything but "64 bit clean." 
>>(Whatever that means.)
>>    
>>
>
>We build on AMD64, PPC64, s390x, and ia64.  That combination of 
>64 bit builds, gives more than adequate testing of the 64bit 
>cleanliness of the majority of the OS.  Any remaining differences 
>are almost always either architecture specific (not 64bit 
>specific), or they're hardware specific, such as driver problems, 
>etc.   In that case, porting to Sparc or Alpha would not benefit 
>anything more than Sparc or Alpha.
>
>
>  
>
>>I remember discussions with one of the roving RedHat bus teams several 
>>years ago, just before RH and Q dumped Alpha, about how 64-bit 
>>computing was the future and being told, "No, x86 is the future."
>>    
>>
>
>Like it or not, that is essentially the bottom line.  I am a
>hardware enthusiast and I love Alpha as much as the next guy.  
>>From that perspective, working on Alpha can be fun and exciting.  
>It can also help to make software more 64bit clean if you use 
>Alpha as your development platform, which of course will benefit 
>all other 64bit architectures as long as the problems you're 
>fixing aren't just Alpha specific issues.  However it isn't the 
>fact you'd be using Alpha specifically that provides these 
>benefits.  It's the fact you're using 64bit hardware to find and 
>fix 64bit problems, and as mentioned above, we do that already on 
>4 different architectures.
>
>One might additionally argue that by porting to Alpha, people who 
>have alpha but no other 64bit arch, would be testing things who 
>otherwise might not, and so additional problems would likely be 
>found that could be fixed and benefit other architectures too.  I 
>would have to agree with that sentiment too.  However, it isn't 
>just about fixing more bugs, it is all about the overall picture. 
>It is about allocating engineering resources in an effective 
>manner.  Spending 1/5 of our available finite 
>engineering/QA/RELENG resources developing Alpha, is not going to 
>make our other 7 architecture ports 20% better.  It might result 
>in a handful of bugfixes that apply equally to other 
>architectures, but at a cost of 1/5 of our engineering, or even 
>at a cost of 1/10th of our engineering, it doesn't result in an 
>benefit to us that scales with the effort expended.
>
>Why then, do we develop for the non-x86 architectures we develop 
>for?  Because large hardware vendors contract us and pay us money 
>to do so, and there are long term benefits for this for some of 
>these architectures to make it viable to do so from a business 
>perspective.
>
>Currently, the commercial interest in Alpha and Sparc are very 
>small.  Small enough to mostly be insignificant aparently, or 
>I'd expect the hardware vendors producing Alpha and Sparc 
>hardware to be interested in contracting to have a port 
>completed.  Since both platforms are dead or dying however, the 
>long term benefits to us are very small for such ports, and so 
>the costs to do such are likely to be much higher.
>
>One might read this email, and call me the Devil's advocate for
>all I know.  And if someone feels that way, sobeit.  In reality
>however, I'm just fairly good at being able to separate my
>ideological views from viable business views on what is the best
>way to allocate engineering resources within a business such as
>Red Hat.
>
>When you have finite engineering resources - and all companies
>do, you can often choose from spending those resources on 1 of
>1000 different projects.  Any one of those 1000 projects will
>provide you hopefully with some benefit for the resource spent.  
>A most successful business however will allocate their finite
>engineering resources projects that provide the biggest bang to
>the company per engineering manhour spent, at the cost of not 
>spending those engineering resources on projects that generate 
>fewer benefits in the grand scheme of things.
>
>>From that perspective, x86 and it's offspring very much is the 
>future, mainly via commoditization.  AMD64 is currently the most 
>likely scenario of what x86 will be 5 years out, and so I see 
>AMD64 as "the future".  Again, while I love Alpha, and am 
>saddened deeply by seeing it die, the death of Alpha isn't going 
>to be reversed by an official Fedora Core port.
>
>Legacy architectures, for better or worse, are best left in the 
>hands of the community who care about them the most, and who have 
>the time to put elbow grease into the mix to keep their 
>ideologically favourite hardware up and running well into the 
>upcoming decade(s).
>
>So, in response to your assertion - we already have viable PPC 
>and PPC64 products, and doing an Alpha port was completely 
>unnecessary to achieve that goal.  If anything, the ia64, AMD64, 
>PPC64, and s390x ports of our OS do MUCH more to benefit Alpha, 
>than would doing an official port to Alpha benefit the others, 
>because we have large customers using this hardware, and large 
>vendors spending money to ensure we support these architectures.  
>A 64bit bug fixed on AMD64, ia64, ppc64, or s390x, is highly 
>likely to be a bug an Alpha user will now never have to see.
>
>Evidence is that the majority of the OS alegedly recompiles
>without modification and works on Alpha.  The remaining stuff 
>that does not work on Alpha, is where our engineering resources 
>would have to be spent, and that's where the real work is - in 
>architecture specific stuff like the kernel, glibc, gcc, etc. 
>which for the most part only benefits the architecture being 
>developed, since it is architecture specific problems.
>
>As such, the community of Alpha enthusiasts (and I'm one of them)
>shouldn't be angry at Red Hat for not supporting Alpha platform, 
>but instead they should be gracious to Red Hat for fixing bugs in 
>the software on AMD64/ia64/PPC64/s390x which would have also been 
>bugs on Alpha/Sparc64 per se.
>
>Yes, even though we don't have an official Alpha port, as you can 
>see, we are doing our part.  And the Alphacore project appears to 
>be doing good filling in the rest of the mix.  Any remaining 
>problems people find are easily fixed with volunteer 
>elbow-grease, or money.
>
>TTYL
>
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