Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> The best argument for continuing to support Alpha is probably that
> Linux does. I don't know how they do that.
My sneaking suspicion is that they don't very well. In particular,
unless I misunderstand things fundamentally, the coherency issues
would be invisible without a multi-CPU machine, and there are probably
not that many multi-CPU Alphas still alive. The kernel could well be
full of bugs that don't manifest on single-CPU Alphas.
I also note that nominal support is quite different from being production
grade. Red Hat, for instance, never supported Alpha hardware (at least
not while I was there), and I doubt that any other commercial Linux
support provider has supported it in a long time either. If there were
bugs, how many people would notice or care?
regards, tom lane