Linux Plans To Stop Building a.out Support On Alpha & M68k To See If Anyone Cares

[jabl]

My personal experience were the AlphaStations that were basically PCs but used Alpha CPUs bought by the principle investigator for the particle physics lab I worked for at university. Everything else was PC industry standard including RAM and PCI slots - a huge departure for DEC, but it wouldn't save them as a business.

We had lots of Alpha workstations in the student labs in the university, and I had one as my personal workstations as well when I started working at the physics lab. It ran OSF/1, there was discussion about installing some Alpha Linux distribution in order to get a wider array of out of the box software as the DEC collection was rather sparse, but dithering for a few years solved the problem as by then PC's were cheaper, faster and less quirky.

I'd guess by now a RPi would run circles around that old Alpha workstation.

We also had an Alpha based cluster, when the lab got rid of that IIRC it was sold for spare parts to some nuclear power plant.

[Chewi]

Question for you, would Gentoo m68k work on the Vampire m68K FPGA accelerators? is their "68080" implementation decent enough?

I really don't know. I gather it's supposed to be compatible so I don't see why not. GCC and the kernel doesn't know anything about the 68080, so any new instructions wouldn't get used, but it would probably still be fast.

[Developer12]

One wonders whether anyone cares about Alpha anymore? At some point I believe the kernel developers had some interest in it has it had the loosest craziest memory consistency model imaginable, so they used it as a sort of lowest common denominator when designing their own memory barrier etc. abstractions. But if nobody actually runs anything on Alpha anymore, why bother?

I suppose it's interesting from an historical perspective. It was the very first architecture linux was ported to.

[motang]

First programming class taught us how to do "Hello, world!" in C++ and its output file was a.out.

[kylew77]

I suppose it's interesting from an historical perspective. It was the very first architecture linux was ported to.

Came here to say this. After the i386 Alpha came next. But just as i386 support was removed a few years ago and now requires an i486, ALpha might not stick around much longer. Heck it is hard to find a distro other than a source based one for anything less than an i686 class processor nowadays. Most people don't want to run anything older than a P3 nowadays. Used to see some dual P3 slotted processors used for web servers but don't even see that with the Raspberry pi 4 and newer being just about as good.

[kylew77]

First programming class taught us how to do "Hello, world!" in C++ and its output file was a.out.

Michael put a disclaimer that said that a.out of a compiler is not the same as as an a.out executable. I was confused the first time I read that they were depreciating a.out too. If you do the command "file a.out" it will say something like 64 bit executable built for kernel 3.x+ ELF shared libraries something like that (on my work MAC so don't have a linux system in front of me).

[motang]

Michael put a disclaimer that said that a.out of a compiler is not the same as as an a.out executable. I was confused the first time I read that they were depreciating a.out too. If you do the command "file a.out" it will say something like 64 bit executable built for kernel 3.x+ ELF shared libraries something like that (on my work MAC so don't have a linux system in front of me).

Ah thanks for clarification.