Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 08:41:56 +0100 From: Thomas Pornin <pornin@bolet.org> To: Alan McKay <amckay@ottawa.com> Cc: alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: most stable *N*X for alpha? Message-ID: <20020225084156.A29431@gnah.bolet.org> In-Reply-To: <1247.216.187.107.78.1014568346.squirrel@secure.quay.net>; from amckay@ottawa.com on Sun, Feb 24, 2002 at 11:32:26AM -0500 References: <1247.216.187.107.78.1014568346.squirrel@secure.quay.net>
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On Sun, Feb 24, 2002 at 11:32:26AM -0500, Alan McKay wrote: > I'm wondering if there is perhaps a Linux distro for alpha that is > known for stability. My main use will be to use the alpha box as an > xterm to display stuff running from my FreeBSD/intel server. I have used an Alpha machine from 1998 to 2001 as a workstation, and I tried several OS. The setup included NFS-mount of home directories (from Sun Solaris servers) and NIS passwords. In my experience: -- Linux is and has always been a bit flaky on Alpha hardware. Some code (for instance NFS, until late versions of NFSv3 support in Linux) was not 64-bit clean, and the filesystems were not reliable (there was some problem of power supply in the building, which induced some power losses and subsequent fsck -- Linux fsck is slow and unreliable). Redhat 5.2 and 6.2 releases proved to be mostly usable. 6.0 was not. -- NetBSD/Alpha runs well but, at that time, lacked some hardware support (floppy disk, for instance). -- OpenBSD/Alpha, at that time, lacked shared libraries, which made it a non-option. I hear shared libraries are now supported in the latest OpenBSD/Alpha, so this may be an option worth investigating. I guess it will be quite comparable with NetBSD. -- FreeBSD, beginning with 4.2, proved to be the most stable and effective OS on this station (I tried several 4.x, including a very early 4.0-CURRENT snapshot). I still use FreeBSD on my own Alpha machine at home (it is my firewall / mail server). Note that XFree has some problems, that are common to both Linux and FreeBSD: sometimes, launching XFree freezes the machine and a cold-reboot is necessary. Once XFree has ran succesfully, it will not crash the machine until the next cold reboot. Some tricky PCI stuff I believe. If you have the money, you might try Tru64 (formerly known as OSF/1). It is a bit crude in some respects, and uses quite some RAM, but it is also rock solid. (All this is of course my own opinion, which is worth a lot in my reckoning but maybe not in your own vision of reality.) --Thomas Pornin To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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