Re: lenny+1 and the future of the alpha port?
- To: Gary Lee Phillips <tivo.overo@gmail.com>
- Cc: debian-alpha@lists.debian.org
- Subject: Re: lenny+1 and the future of the alpha port?
- From: Tim Cutts <timc@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
- Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2008 11:02:06 +0100
- Message-id: <39A9292C-5E7A-44E1-BB8A-A061EA9C067B@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
- In-reply-to: <4eddfc4c0808221434k4cb5f972t27afd64e1f2bc496@mail.gmail.com>
- References: <20080822053622.GB3815@dario.dodds.net> <20080822191114.ok4il4hyos4gc004@ente.limmat.ch> <200808220728.07486.james@zuelow.net> <1219404608l.31786l.0l@server> <48AE9F7E.7060602@dilmun.ls.fi.upm.es> <20080822211641.GA11307@dario.dodds.net> <4eddfc4c0808221434k4cb5f972t27afd64e1f2bc496@mail.gmail.com>
On 22 Aug 2008, at 10:34 pm, Gary Lee Phillips wrote:
Institutions and individuals in tight financial situations or in less
technically advanced areas continue to use Alphas because they are
what is
available. Buying newer 64-bit machines may simply be out of the
question
for them.
I don't think that's true. I don't think any PC vendors now sell
Wintel machines which don't have 64-bit capability.
I may just stick with etch for that, since as you say, bits
of lenny are already broken on the Alpha.
That's certainly true, and even etch is quite broken, especially on
the larger-scale hardware. albeniz.d.o and goetz.d.o are both quad-
CPU ES45's, and as you may all have noticed have been horribly
unreliable. It turns out that SMP support seems to be really flaky on
that particular type of machine (and I would guess probably also on
other similar vintage Compaq alpha server boxes). We've had to move
them to the alpha-generic uniprocessor kernel, because that's the only
thing that's even remotely stable.
The default lenny kernels we can't use at all, because licensing
issues have caused the kernel maintainers to disable some of the
drivers required to make albeniz and goetz work. I can only see this
sort of bit rot getting worse, with time. As a result, I'm probably
happy for alpha support to stop after lenny.
With respect to electricity consumption, the machines I have don't
really
use any more than other desktop PCs would. Nor do they take up a lot
more
space, as far as that goes.
On the server side, that isn't true either. ES45s are huge beasts (7U
high), which is enormous compared to, say, an HP DL360, which can have
8 CPU cores and a lot more memory than the ES45 in a 1U box, and will
use less power too.
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.
Reply to: