Gentoo Made Progress In 2023 On Binary Packages, Modern C & Reviving DEC Alpha Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Gentoo Made Progress In 2023 On Binary Packages, Modern C & Reviving DEC Alpha Support

The Gentoo Linux project published a 2023 retrospective on Monday that outlines their ongoing high level of development, gaining three new developers over the past calendar year, and various initiatives embarked on by the developers...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Gentoo-2023-Progress

[rene]

Nice to see dist other than T2 Is still working on DEC Alpha AXP support! https://t2sde.org/architectures/alpha/

[uid313]

"revived support for the DEC Alpha architecture" ... but why??

[skeevy420]

They also offer v3 packages. There's more, but y'all can click the links in the article.

[kylew77]

"revived support for the DEC Alpha architecture" ... but why??

I don't know but I have a hypothesis, OpenBSD maintains Alpha support because it is one of the platforms easiest to catch bugs on for some reason, and I wonder if that is the same reason Gentoo supports it.

[Kjell]

They also offer v3 packages. There's more, but y'all can click the links in the article.

V3 pre-built packages?

Although I suppose you wouldn't be able to customize USE flags without rebuilding :/

[sobrus]

Oh I miss good old times when there were many competing ideas and architectures. Now we just have ARM and x86 everywhere + standarized DX12 GPU on top of that.
And it is just plan BORING.

Ok I know that economically that makes no sense and I totally understand it. but computers were so much interesting with custom hardware.
Even consoles became PCs from AMD.

Of course they're nice, but gaming on 32 core Alpha with 8 way SMT, with 4 custom Toshiba DSPs on xDRAM cache and custom Hitachi SH-8 "Paula" sound coprocessor mated to AI based Lockheed Martin sourced custom 3D hardware with "Neura" neural blitter that leaves any AMD/Nvidia in dust - for $499 released on Christmas would be so much better!

[jabl]

I don't know but I have a hypothesis, OpenBSD maintains Alpha support because it is one of the platforms easiest to catch bugs on for some reason, and I wonder if that is the same reason Gentoo supports it.

Some people working on memory model stuff in the Linux kernel were using Alpha for testing, as that has the most crazy relaxed memory consistency model out there. And thus the core kernel concurrency primitives were designed around the alpha behavior as a kind of least common denominator.

However, with the death of Alpha the kernel concurrency primitives have gone through a couple rounds of de-alphafication, with the result that some of the primitives are unnecessarily strong on alpha (but nobody cares), and more like commonly used architectures that are still weakly ordered like power or arm.

I guess to a limited extent the same argument can be extended to user space concurrency, but at some point you're in the position where you're finding only bugs that affect alpha, and one can wonder about the usefulness of that work.

But hey, as long as the people involved are having fun and not hurting anybody else, who am I to complain?

[ids1024]

"revived support for the DEC Alpha architecture" ... but why??

Presumably someone involved in Gentoo has some Alpha hardware and thought it would be fun to get Gentoo working properly on it. That's how volunteer driven open source tends often works.

There's not that much maintenance burden to adding an architecture if you don't offer binary packages... or any particular guarantee of support. Gentoo has a lot of architectures and other options, but not all of them will work particularly well.

[uid313]

Presumably someone involved in Gentoo has some Alpha hardware and thought it would be fun to get Gentoo working properly on it. That's how volunteer driven open source tends often works.

There's not that much maintenance burden to adding an architecture if you don't offer binary packages... or any particular guarantee of support. Gentoo has a lot of architectures and other options, but not all of them will work particularly well.

I hope they don't waste any CI on it. That it don't waste any time or energy on the build servers.

Sounds like a smart guy if he knows how to maintain that kind of stuff, he should focus on something more important.