What is the value in continuing to support Alpha, SGI, and PA-RISC?
Were they cool in their day? Sure. But the consumer router you use to hook up an O2 or an Octane to the internet has a more powerful MIPS CPU.
Were they cool in their day? Sure. But the consumer router you use to hook up an O2 or an Octane to the internet has a more powerful MIPS CPU.
It also helps to have systems that are slow or have low memory, occasionally they hit bugs that are unnoticed on modern hardware.
Alpha may have been interesting in that it had some peripheral similarities to PC machines, but were actual 64-bit computers in the 90s. For kernel driver hackers, popping in a PCI network card that was probably never tested on anything besides a x86 PC, getting it to pass packets, and then making it your home firewall, was a thing of beauty.
I think that trying 'oddball' platforms indeed help shaking out bugs. But if that's the goal (rather than supporting the five users that still use such hardware), wouldn't it be more attractive to build pseudo-platforms in an emulator that simulate other architecture choices, and run it on fast and easy-to-get x86_64 hardware?
That said, the real reason these platforms continue to exist because volunteers continue to maintain them. You would have to ask those individuals what value they derive from the hobby.
If anyone knows some similar example please let us know.
Yes, you could do an image loader for HP-UX bins on another OS, but that level of technical competence is rare.
The reason why OS people do ports - portable software is good software. Avoiding ISA monoculture avoids shortcuts in kernel architecture. Some ISAs (alpha, sparc64) easily trigger invalid assumptions on ordering, alignment, endianness, etc improving overall quality. Alternative archs are also a great way to learn about areas of the system that are "done", so you can go fix and improve the things that were assumed to be "done" once you have requisite background.
Which consumer routers have 64-bit MIPS CPUs? I thought they'd mostly settled on mediocre 32-bit CPUs.
OpenBSD does have a port for the ER series, but it's separate from the SGI MIPS ports:
(I just realized that's a pretty subjective question but I actually am interested in the opinion of someone who has interest in the odd corners of openbsd)
Note: I don't use OpenBSD on it, just the default OS which is a custom roll of Debian.
It's certainly not a problem for me if that's really just a limit on bandwidth, and not some kind of additional CPU load or network latency.
I run a OpenBSD router in a PC Engine Apu1d and it's more than fast enough. I can hit 700+ mbps on iperf with a basic pf rule set. Since OpenBSD is in the middle of updating their network stack to enable SMP I'd bet that number will rise with the next couple releases. I found mailing list posts from a year ago that have the iperf benchmarks of the apu1d right at 500 mbps. I'm interested to see if the network changes that landed in 6.0 will mean a measurable difference. This is entirely academic on a 30 mbps connection but I like it when numbers change.