[NTLUG:Discuss] Alphaserver 2100 -- do the BSD's have good MP yet?

[Eric Schnoebelen]

"Bryan J. Smith" writes:
- Burton M. Strauss III wrote:  
- > - For a current OS, I think FreeBSD (or NetBSD - it runs on ANYTHING)
- > may be your best choice.
- 
- Eric Schnoebelen wrote:  
- > I strongly recommend NetBSD.  As the comment above says, it runs on
- > anything.. :-)
- > I've got an entire cluster of Alphas running NetBSD here, from
- > AlphaPC64's through AlphaPC164's to Digital Server 3305's to
- > (lots of) DS10L's..   Nary a burp.
- 
- But aren't those uP (uniprocessor)?

	Yes, most of the above are uniprocessor machines..
Also in the mix, (but forgotten) are some API CS20's which are
dual processor systems.

- I've been outside the BSD loop for a bit.
- But I was under the impression that no BSD kernel has a good
- MP implementation yet.  Am I mistaken?

	You're mistaken.  FreeBSD has had a reasonable SMP
implementation for a while, and NetBSD's 2.0 release (in beta
now) has a fairly fine grained SMP implementation (matching many
other OS's second generation SMP), along with an excellent
pthreads implementation.

	Also, NetBSD has Linux and OSF/1 personality modules on
the Alpha, so almost anything from either of those OS's will run
as well.. The primary exception being OSF/1 applications that
make Mach calls instead of UNIX calls. (and even that's
improving with the Mach personality modules being added to the
system.)

- For older hardware, Debian Linux/Alpha is not bad at all.
- I'd recommend it.  But I don't know "how well maintained" it is.

	It appears to be better maintained than many of the
other Linux distributions.. 

- But Digital did have Linux develop 64-bit on Alpha back in '95
- onward, donating all the hardware he needed.

	Yes, Digital did give Linus an alpha to play with back
in the mid 90's..  I think he's been working predominately on
x86 (or Carusoe) since..

- BTW, here's the release notes on FreeBSD 5.2.1 for the Alphaserver
- 2000 series, including the 2100:  
- http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.2.1R/hardware-alpha.html#AEN1009  

	I'd strongly recommend reading the freebsd-alpha mailing
list.  I seem to remember there being problems  with EV4 systems
recently (no matter what the supported documentation says. :-)

	NetBSD on alpha information can be found ath
http://www.netbsd.org/alpha.  The release notes referenced there
will be for 1.6.2, but as I mentioned earlier, 2.0 is in (late)
beta, and getting run time on it will certainly  help improve
the product..

--
Eric Schnoebelen		eric at cirr.com		http://www.cirr.com
	"Any field of study that has 'science' as part of it's name
		  isn't.  For example, computer science."