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DEC Alpha was the first non-x86 platform supported in Linux (and in FreeBSD, where I did a lot of the work). Linux was doing just fine in 1994 when DEC gave Li
by drewg123 6y ago
DEC Alpha was the first non-x86 platform supported in Linux (and in FreeBSD, where I did a lot of the work). Linux was doing just fine in 1994 when DEC gave Linus an alpha at the Boston USENIX.
The key fact is that, in the mid 90s, DEC Alpha was the fastest thing around, and poised to take over the world. It was expected to be the future (until it was killed by corporate incompetence and itanic). That's why I worked on FreeBSD support, and why Linus worked on Linux support. Alpha was also valuable because it was one of the first 64-bit platforms, and found a lot of pointer/int/long bugs on both systems.
There is a big difference between supporting what you expect to be the future of computing to what you know to be the long dead past.
- cesaref 6y agoYeah, I was involved in a large Ada project running on 4 socket Alpha servers back in the early 90s. It was a great platform (OSF/1 anyone?) and was very fast and powerful for it's day. As for bugs, I seem to remember that it had a rather different cache coherency model to Intel, and as you said, was strict about memory alignment.
- trasz 6y agoSome architectures are useful even if one can already tell they are probably not the future. For FreeBSD, sparc64 was important, because you could get multiprocessor sparc64 machines easier (cheaper) than x86 with the same CPU count, even if they were slower; this made it possible to do work on scalability sooner. Now the same is happening with POWER9/10.
- JaimeThompson 6y agoThe sandbox in this instance would be Linux creating a Unix compatible operating system not that Linux supported multiple platforms.