On 8/23/26 15:01, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
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
Ah yes ... this seems familair now. I am in a 9 month time loop.
OKay, for now I will just assume "no you can not" until anything
changes. If ever. Where do we stand on the MIPS hardware?
--
--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
