On 08/01/2014 04:52, Raúl Porcel wrote: > On 07/26/14 19:33, Michael Palimaka wrote: >> On 07/27/2014 03:19 AM, William Hubbs wrote: >>> If an arch team isn't going to honor a stable request, shouldn't they >>> remove themselves from it and say so? >>> >>> Also, if an arch team does that, does that mean we don't have to file >>> stable requests for that arch on future versions of the package? >> >> When armin did stabilisation for minor archs in the past, he took the >> opportunity to evaluate whether it was still useful to have the package >> stable. In many cases for small random packages, stable keywords were >> dropped to reduce future workload. I always thought it was a pretty good >> strategy. > > Indeed! The thing was that a lot of the packages were keyworded and > marked stable back in the day where the arch was more popular. > > But almost all arches except amd64/x86/arm are getting less and less > popular: > > alpha: no new hardware in more than 8+ years > hppa: being phased out IIRC, and no new workstations(ie, graphics/sound) > in 5+ years > ia64: no new workstations in 10 years, new servers are expensive > ppc*: new workstations are expensive > sparc: no new workstations in 7+ years, new servers expensive
Who says they have to be new? Sometimes, the fun is in the old hardware of yore. I found out last week that sparc32 is still quasi-alive, though it doesn't appear to have any mainstream kernel maintainers. ia64, go search on eBay for old SGI Altix/Prism gear. There's a metric ton of Altix units being offloaded lately. There was one listing a few weeks ago that had 10-20 Altix 350 servers, dual or quad CPU, for ~$90 per server. Even saw an SGI Prism a few days ago (which is just an ia64 variant of the Tezro). > One of the reasons they are being killed, IMHO, its that the power > consumption isn't worth, and an amd64 machine is pretty much more > powerful, has more cores, and cheaper and has a lot less power consumption. This is always a concern. I used to run equipment 24/7, but that took chunks out of my electric bill each month. Now, I sleep both of my Intel systems and power down the SGI machines when they're not in use. I eventually need to test out hibernation on the SGIs and see if that can be of any use. Ctrl+Z in the middle of a compile, then hibernate...in theory, I should be able to resume and then 'fg' the compile back into action. > My Sun Blade 1000 (workstation) uses 225W idling, my amd64 workstation > uses 100W at full power or so. And the amd64 has way more cores and more > performance. And let's not talk about the heat... SGI O2, 1x CPU, 512MB RAM, 2x HDDs - ~80W SGI Octane, 1x CPU, 2GB RAM, 3x HDDs - ~303-330W SGI Onyx2, 4x CPUs, 8GB RAM, 5 HDDs - ~720W I ran some very quick calculations on running those three systems full time, 24/7 for a month, along with my two Intel Linux systems (~160W and ~140W), about ~$0.10/kWh (distribution charge only, did not factor in transmission rates nor taxes), and it should only add an extra ~$120 to my bill per month, which isn't that bad (but then again, I am serviced by a co-op that has low rates). So running them less often should be easily manageable. Probably moreso in winter, as rates are bit lower then (gas isn't, though, but SGIs make great space heaters). > Besides there's software like firefox and gnome3 that doesn't work in > sparc due to unaligned accesses. Pft, if people want those shinies, run them on a standard PC. If the only point of having an alternate arch is so you can surf the web...then I don't see much of a point. The direction that most of the large projects are going in is not conducive to old equipment anyways. There is, however, always going to be the smaller projects that might be tickled pink on having their software run on old hardware. Like maybe someone taking fvwm and tailoring it to look like IRIX's 4dwm. Something I've thought about if I ever get bored enough, and can fix all the other bugs I keep running into on these systems. > Debian announced some months ago that they're dropping sparc support as > well. Right now debian doesn't support, officially, alpha, hppa and sparc. Their loss :) -- Joshua Kinard Gentoo/MIPS ku...@gentoo.org 4096R/D25D95E3 2011-03-28 "The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between." --Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic
