The State of Alpha Linux

[Matt Turner]

The State of Alpha Linux

We're all subscribed to this list because we use a dying platform. 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]
   2.Kernel development for Alpha is comatose
   3.We can't run modern X.Org [2]

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?
How many realized we were without a glibc maintainer? That we can't
use X.Org 7.4?

If this trend continues, we will completely first lose X.Org support.
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]!

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?

While we may never lose kernel support, it will certainly begin to lag
behind other platforms more and more. Bugs begin to take longer and
longer to be fixed [6]. Release candidate kernels as late in the cycle
as rc-8 of the 2.6.28 series fail to compile on Alpha [7]. This is
definitely a worrying sign.

It is certainly expected that as a platform ages, it slowly loses its
users and developers. In 1999, many average users knew or we're
interested in learning Alpha assembly language, were interested in
support for Alpha among Free Software, and were interested in
programming for the platform. Obviously this cannot be the case today.
We don't expect that it should.

We, the ones who do wish to see our platform live on, even if only a
little longer, should focus on fixing what we can and maintaining what
we already have.

Whether Fedora adds Alpha as a Second Tier Architecture is trivial in
comparison to these issues. We should focus on making sure we have
working software for Fedora/Alpha before we consider how to properly
market it.

We, the small band of Alpha users, need to work together. We have the
same problems, why should we work separately on them?

In order to facilitate better communication among Alpha users,
developers, please use the Alpha IRC channel on Freenode, #alpha, and
the Wiki [8]. If you have unused hardware that may be useful to
developers, consider donating it.

>From here, it's up to us to find solutions to these problems.

Ideas and Suggestions requested.

Matt Turner

[1] http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2008-12/msg00009.html
[2] http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17801
     http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10893
[3] http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19026
[4] http://sources.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6896
[5] Actually a kernel problem,
     http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=205099
[6] http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10893
[7] http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/10/29/69
[8] http://alphalinux.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page