This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.alpha From: Emile van bergen <emile@n293.ede.telekabel.euronet.nl> Subject: Re: X on alpha Date: Wed, 8 Sep 1999 23:09:57 +0000 On Fri, 3 Sep 1999, Stephen Moore wrote: > s.moore@bigpond.com wrote: [SNIP] > > Is X just a waste of time on alphas? No; my Matrox Mystique and the built-in DEC TGA both work fine in my UDB (21066A) box. > > Is there a readily available pci card I can put in this machine that has > > a chance of working? See above. > I have given up on X. > I can get the machine to boot but it seems remarkable unstable. This > machine ran vms for years reliably. > > I have installed RH6.0 and have (as yet) applied no patchs. is there some > essential updates? (not security related) that I need to apply for the > beast to be stable? No essential update, an essential downgrade. The kernel 2.2 series (used in RH 6.0) seem to be quite unstable indeed on Alphas. My Alpha system is based on the 2.0.35 kernel (with DEC's patches, get it at ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com), glibc 2.0.7 and a lot of binaries borrowed from RH 5.2 (Thanks to rpm2cpio). I couldn't tell you otherwise than that it seems to be very stable indeed. Even if I boot with only 8Mb ram and tell it to go compile a kernel and hence swap like crazy, the machine is still in usable state in the morning. No lockups, no memory leaks whatsoever, AFAICS. I haven't tested X that heavily yet though, but it sure does seem to be working OK. > Symptoms include. > > random freezes > wont reboot > weird ping stuff (I notice a upgrade to nettools on the RedHat site) Yep, the last one is a 'known problem'. Also, there seems to have happened a lot of ABI changes from glibc 2.1 (RH6) and glibc 2.0.7 (RH 5.2) on Alphas, much worse than on Intels. Tools compiled against 2.0.7 can be very buggy indeed on 2.1. And remember, if a buggy tool is ran as root, it's got permission (by design) to crash your system. > I can live without X but I need a stable system. I was using this as a > "test" of linux on alpha. > > Have I picked a bad machine? No, more likely a bad (version of your) distro. ===