Hi Dennis, On Sun, 2026-08-23 at 12:28 -0400, Dennis Clarke wrote: > What is the situation with Linux on Alpha? My understanding is > that the Linux kernel ( and all tools? ) will only work correctly on a more > recent Alpha processor based system. The older EV5 type processor such > as the 21164 is dropped entirely due to some convoluted and massively > complicated memory access problem. The Alpha 21264 ( EV6 ) *may* work > but I have yet to see that.
The toolchain still fully supports non-BWX Alphas and there are no plans to change that. The kernel currently does not support non-BWX Alphas, but as I mentioned in my previous message, there are plans to resurrect it [1]. I don't think though that we are going to lower the baseline in Debian to EV4 again, so if you want to run Linux on an older Alpha machine in the future after non-BWX support has been readded to the kernel, you will have to run an alternative distribution such as Gentoo. Adrian > [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-alpha/2026/03/msg00011.html -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
