Re: lenny+1 and the future of the alpha port?

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>]

On Aug 28, 2008, at 05:49, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > Sometimes it isn't about what is most efficient.  Besides if you  
> > have a
> > working machine why buy a new one (unless electricity starts to  
> > cost too
> > much to justify the old one running).
>
> It was precisely my point that I think that replacing an old alpha  
> with a
> lower-power, modern machine would pay for itself in electricity  
> savings in a
> reasonably short amount of time.

It'd kind of be cheating, but... a quick google search suggests that  
there are Alpha emulators out there; are any free and good enough to  
run Debian, and run it at anything near real hardware speed?  If so,  
some porting work could be done without quite so much electricity.   
Though of course that still raises the question, "Why??"  For me, it'd  
be testing software on a modern OS, but on hardware with alignment  
requirements and other characteristics that don't match x86, and thus  
help highlight bugs caused by the "all the world's a PC" mentality.   
And a bit of nostalgia (same reason I've got an old vaxstation in my  
basement).

>  carrying on supporting an architecture that has
> ceased to be useful to them (and almost everyone else in the world)?

Yeah, that's NetBSD's job. :)

> If people love being able to keep their alphas running, let them  
> step up to
> do the work.  Right now all I see is a dying port, and I'm trying to  
> make
> sure that the last one out turns off the lights.

Wish I had time to help. :(  I've got two or three machines sitting  
around my office waiting for installs (and maybe new disks), but no  
time to play with them.

Ken