5 ms·

What is the value in continuing to support Alpha, SGI, and PA-RISC? Were they cool in their day? Sure. But the consumer router you use to hook up an O2 or an

What is the value in continuing to support Alpha, SGI, and PA-RISC? Were they cool in their day? Sure. But the consumer router you use to hook up an O2 or an Octane to the internet has a more powerful MIPS CPU.

notaplumber 10y ago
There have been many advantages to running on different platforms, which have various quirks.. different endians, page sizes, strict alignment requirements, stack-grows-up machines (hppa). It also helps to have systems that are slow or have low memory, occasionally they hit bugs that are unnoticed on modern hardware. Alpha may have been interesting in that it had some peripheral similarities to PC machines, but were actual 64-bit computers in the 90s. For kernel driver hackers, popping in a PCI network card that was probably never tested on anything besides a x86 PC, getting it to pass packets, and then making it your home firewall, was a thing of beauty.
- kristopolous 10y ago
  you interested in one? I got openbsd and openvms disks for you and the machine itself. You can have that beauty again. You can put it next to the HPPA you'll be getting as the door prize.
  - notaplumber 10y ago
    That's tempting, but I'm probably not nearby. If you're really offering hardware, SCSI disks etc. OpenBSD developers surely might jump at the chance. http://www.openbsd.org/want.html http://www.openbsd.org/want.html
- danieldk 10y ago
  There have been many advantages to running on different platforms, which have various quirks.. different endians, page sizes, strict alignment requirements, stack-grows-up machines (hppa). I think that trying 'oddball' platforms indeed help shaking out bugs. But if that's the goal (rather than supporting the five users that still use such hardware), wouldn't it be more attractive to build pseudo-platforms in an emulator that simulate other architecture choices, and run it on fast and easy-to-get x86_64 hardware?
  - IcePic 10y ago
    You don't find races and bugs on emulators the same way as on real hardware. Also, if you do find a bug in your emulated environment, how much time would you spend wondering if the emulator is bad or your code? Also, there is a real chance that the emulator would let stuff pass (like allowing code make memory or bus access on odd address or some other restraint) which really shouldn't be allowed and you would not notice it.
bch 10y ago
I think of machines like these (disparate architectures (endianess, buses, processors)) as sort canaries, or watchmen for Good Code. NetBSD (my preferred OS) is the same in supporting multiple architectures with one codebase, and I like to think it strengthens the operating system for all platforms.
justin66 10y ago
> But the consumer router you use to hook up an O2 or an Octane to the internet has a more powerful MIPS CPU. Which consumer routers have 64-bit MIPS CPUs? I thought they'd mostly settled on mediocre 32-bit CPUs.
- hapless 10y ago
  The Ubiquiti "EdgeRouter" series features Cavium Octeons. They're moderately fast MIPS64 SoCs with hardware offload for a lot of common network operations. OpenBSD does have a port for the ER series, but it's separate from the SGI MIPS ports: https://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html https://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html
  - justin66 10y ago
    How good is that edgerouter hardware? The price is pretty attractive. (I just realized that's a pretty subjective question but I actually am interested in the opinion of someone who has interest in the odd corners of openbsd)
    - rufius 10y ago
      I have one for my gigabit connection at home and quite like it. It's able to hit about 933mbps to WAN->LAN which is important. Note: I don't use OpenBSD on it, just the default OS which is a custom roll of Debian.
      - aomix 10y ago
        It's worth noting that hitting that performance relies on hardware acceleration not available on OpenBSD. I've read it can still manage ~100 mbps on OpenBSD which should be good enough for most people. But keep that in mind if you want serious routing performance and OpenBSD.
        justin66 10y ago
        Is that a hardware acceleration of some portion of the network stack that's not carrying over to OpenBSD? It's certainly not a problem for me if that's really just a limit on bandwidth, and not some kind of additional CPU load or network latency.
hapless 10y ago
An Octane is still much more powerful than your average consumer router. Don't underestimate the value of memory bandwidth. That said, the real reason these platforms continue to exist because volunteers continue to maintain them. You would have to ask those individuals what value they derive from the hobby.
eb0la 10y ago
There are a lot of 10+ year old pa-risc machines out there than cannot be replaced. I remember an optic fiber network currently in use that had embedded pa-risc in underwater equipment, which means they had to be under maintainable for the 25 years of useable life of the cable. If anyone knows some similar example please let us know.
- kev009 10y ago
  Usually this comes coupled with a period-correct OS, i.e. HP-UX. Yes, you could do an image loader for HP-UX bins on another OS, but that level of technical competence is rare. The reason why OS people do ports - portable software is good software. Avoiding ISA monoculture avoids shortcuts in kernel architecture. Some ISAs (alpha, sparc64) easily trigger invalid assumptions on ordering, alignment, endianness, etc improving overall quality. Alternative archs are also a great way to learn about areas of the system that are "done", so you can go fix and improve the things that were assumed to be "done" once you have requisite background.
ams6110 10y ago
The value is probably that there are OpenBSD developers who want to continue supporting these platforms.
crest 10y ago
Running on such systems keeps the developers honest. No mass produced CPU implements as aggressive visible memory access reordering as Alpha AXP CPUs and SPARC faults on unaligned memory accesses while other platforms "just" take a performance hit.

notaplumber 10y ago

There have been many advantages to running on different platforms, which have various quirks.. different endians, page sizes, strict alignment requirements, stack-grows-up machines (hppa). It also helps to have systems that are slow or have low memory, occasionally they hit bugs that are unnoticed on modern hardware. Alpha may have been interesting in that it had some peripheral similarities to PC machines, but were actual 64-bit computers in the 90s. For kernel driver hackers, popping in a PCI network card that was probably never tested on anything besides a x86 PC, getting it to pass packets, and then making it your home firewall, was a thing of beauty.

kristopolous 10y ago
you interested in one? I got openbsd and openvms disks for you and the machine itself. You can have that beauty again. You can put it next to the HPPA you'll be getting as the door prize.
- notaplumber 10y ago
  That's tempting, but I'm probably not nearby. If you're really offering hardware, SCSI disks etc. OpenBSD developers surely might jump at the chance. http://www.openbsd.org/want.html http://www.openbsd.org/want.html
danieldk 10y ago
There have been many advantages to running on different platforms, which have various quirks.. different endians, page sizes, strict alignment requirements, stack-grows-up machines (hppa). I think that trying 'oddball' platforms indeed help shaking out bugs. But if that's the goal (rather than supporting the five users that still use such hardware), wouldn't it be more attractive to build pseudo-platforms in an emulator that simulate other architecture choices, and run it on fast and easy-to-get x86_64 hardware?
- IcePic 10y ago
  You don't find races and bugs on emulators the same way as on real hardware. Also, if you do find a bug in your emulated environment, how much time would you spend wondering if the emulator is bad or your code? Also, there is a real chance that the emulator would let stuff pass (like allowing code make memory or bus access on odd address or some other restraint) which really shouldn't be allowed and you would not notice it.

bch 10y ago

I think of machines like these (disparate architectures (endianess, buses, processors)) as sort canaries, or watchmen for Good Code. NetBSD (my preferred OS) is the same in supporting multiple architectures with one codebase, and I like to think it strengthens the operating system for all platforms.

justin66 10y ago

> But the consumer router you use to hook up an O2 or an Octane to the internet has a more powerful MIPS CPU. Which consumer routers have 64-bit MIPS CPUs? I thought they'd mostly settled on mediocre 32-bit CPUs.

hapless 10y ago
The Ubiquiti "EdgeRouter" series features Cavium Octeons. They're moderately fast MIPS64 SoCs with hardware offload for a lot of common network operations. OpenBSD does have a port for the ER series, but it's separate from the SGI MIPS ports: https://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html https://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html
- justin66 10y ago
  How good is that edgerouter hardware? The price is pretty attractive. (I just realized that's a pretty subjective question but I actually am interested in the opinion of someone who has interest in the odd corners of openbsd)
  - rufius 10y ago
    I have one for my gigabit connection at home and quite like it. It's able to hit about 933mbps to WAN->LAN which is important. Note: I don't use OpenBSD on it, just the default OS which is a custom roll of Debian.
    - aomix 10y ago
      It's worth noting that hitting that performance relies on hardware acceleration not available on OpenBSD. I've read it can still manage ~100 mbps on OpenBSD which should be good enough for most people. But keep that in mind if you want serious routing performance and OpenBSD.
      - justin66 10y ago
        Is that a hardware acceleration of some portion of the network stack that's not carrying over to OpenBSD? It's certainly not a problem for me if that's really just a limit on bandwidth, and not some kind of additional CPU load or network latency.

hapless 10y ago

An Octane is still much more powerful than your average consumer router. Don't underestimate the value of memory bandwidth. That said, the real reason these platforms continue to exist because volunteers continue to maintain them. You would have to ask those individuals what value they derive from the hobby.

eb0la 10y ago

There are a lot of 10+ year old pa-risc machines out there than cannot be replaced. I remember an optic fiber network currently in use that had embedded pa-risc in underwater equipment, which means they had to be under maintainable for the 25 years of useable life of the cable. If anyone knows some similar example please let us know.

kev009 10y ago
Usually this comes coupled with a period-correct OS, i.e. HP-UX. Yes, you could do an image loader for HP-UX bins on another OS, but that level of technical competence is rare. The reason why OS people do ports - portable software is good software. Avoiding ISA monoculture avoids shortcuts in kernel architecture. Some ISAs (alpha, sparc64) easily trigger invalid assumptions on ordering, alignment, endianness, etc improving overall quality. Alternative archs are also a great way to learn about areas of the system that are "done", so you can go fix and improve the things that were assumed to be "done" once you have requisite background.

ams6110 10y ago

The value is probably that there are OpenBSD developers who want to continue supporting these platforms.

crest 10y ago

Running on such systems keeps the developers honest. No mass produced CPU implements as aggressive visible memory access reordering as Alpha AXP CPUs and SPARC faults on unaligned memory accesses while other platforms "just" take a performance hit.