[Maxlinux-devel] We're getting an Alpha port!

[Kelledin <kel...@sk...>]

I just got a reasonably feisty Alpha box a couple of days ago=20
(21164@600MHz) minus a few parts.  I'm now in the process of=20
turning it into a respectable workstation and porting IOS to it,=20
and so far it's going well.  I've got 2.4.18 booting on the box,=20
and soon enough I hope to start building packages.

I hope (and this may be a vain hope) to build packages in sync on=20
both platforms--i.e. whenever IOS-x86 gets updated, so does=20
IOS-alpha.  The first version or two might lag behind, though...

The question now is: what minimum architecture should we support? =20
Just bare-metal "alpha", "alphaev5", or what?  Right now I'm=20
thinking just "alpha".  There were solid technical reasons for=20
going i486-minimum on x86 (LSB compliance, plus minor technical=20
shortcomings on i386 that preclude full LinuxThreads=20
functionality), but it might not be so on the Alpha.

I'm also thinking of posting a poll on inceptionos.org, to see=20
what our future userbase thinks...

--=20
Kelledin
"If a server crashes in a server farm and no one pings it, does=20
it still cost four figures to fix?"