Alpha Core Directions

[William H. Magill]

On 22 Dec, 2004, at 04:51, Maurice Hilarius wrote:
> Hi Mike.
> From what i can see the current Alpha Linux users are mainly in two 
> groups:
> 1) A "hobby" set, as you touched on
> 2) a fair amount of people are still running Alpha servers and 
> clusters for scientific computing. they may now be "old" machines, but 
> they still find them useful, and will not retire them anytime soon.
>
> I think that in general the main focus points for both are:
> Modern kernels and updates.
> Anything for optimization of performance libraries.

Agreed.

However, I suspect that the vast majority of folks in #2 are pretty 
close to the point of
"if it ain't broke, don't upgrade it."

If they have working applications they are not likely to find any kind 
of "need" to
upgrade, just to have the latest and greatest -- especially on dead-end 
hardware.
However, there is still a LOT of horsepower out there which cannot 
easily be replaced yet.
And HP has guaranteed spare parts for another 5 years or so, at least 
for some models.

Drivers for USB, Fibre Channel, storage and the like probably being the 
major exception.

The rest of us in category #1 are probably up for anything, as long as 
it lets us
"upgrade" to the newest toys in Home Automation, PVR, USB 2.0, Firewire 
800,
etc. -- we might not be able to boot from these devices (no SRM 
updates), but if
we can get the OS to recognize the PCI cards, then we've got a fighting 
chance.

The other thing of importance to both groups will be security updates.

One comment about the "hobby" set -- I suspect that a large number of 
us in that
category are using their Alphas as primary servers for their home 
networks. This
puts them in much more of a production category than might otherwise be 
true.
My PWS433 is working on something on the order of 4 years of uptime now.
(The Tru64 kernel was built in May 2001. I ignore power outages of more 
than
the UPS battery, since everything is down including the DSL line.)


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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