Alpha Status Report
1.
Status Reports
Preliminaries
This is the status of the Gentoo/Alpha Arch Team. It will be posted
regularly, but not with a static frequency. All questions can be posted to
gentoo-alpha@gentoo.org.
The Gentoo/Alpha Arch Team, has its own project page (just like almost all
other Gentoo projects). You can find it at
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/. Also you can contact us
via IRC at #gentoo-alpha using Freenode IRC server.
Index
This status report will briefly discuss the following tasks, objectives and/or
projects related to the Gentoo/Alpha Arch Team:
2.
Content
Toolchain and Kernel development
Thanks mainly to Bryan Østergaard (kloeri) and our base
herd, the toolchain and the kernel are in very good health:
-
GCC
GCC was stabilized few days ago to version 3.4.4. Our next step will be
trying to get gcc-4 working in the testing branch.
-
Kernel
New kernel alpha keywords reached Portage tree, so the current situation
is:
- 2.4 series: 2.4.30 (stable) -- 2.4.32 (testing)
- 2.6 series: 2.6.14.2 (stable) -- 2.6.15_rc5 (testing)
udev and nptl support is working fine on the 2.6 kernel series.
-
C libraries
glibc-2.3.5 hit the stable branch a few days ago after being more than a
month in testing and see no important bugs on it. This version allows us
to avoid the critical bug "Threads defuncts on Alpha".
Everybody without nptl support is encourage to install this version as
soon as possible.
-
Binutils
kloeri is planning on bumping to
stable binutils 2.16.1 in the next few days. This way, the whole toolchain
will be completely up to date.
Security Bugs
The Alpha arch team is pleased to say that we've managed all security bugs
within a very reasonable response time. At the moment, no delay on
marking stable versions when security requires it.
Kudos also, to our security herd and
rest of our arch teams for keeping Gentoo security in a high level.
SELinux development
Stephen Bennett (spb) is currently working
on SELinux support for
Gentoo/Alpha and we hope to see a SELinux profile for alpha in the tree as
soon as we feel confident about it.
A little note here to say thanks to Dforge and Virginia Computer Science Department
for maintaining our testing computers and adding the new boxes to support
SELinux development.
Modular Xorg on Gentoo/Alpha
Thanks to our developer Stefaan De Roeck (stefaan) the modular Xorg porting to alpha is
going pretty well. We are still waiting for upstream to fix some errors before
putting the alpha keyword on it.
Stefaan also has a tinderbox to check modular xorg on alpha:
Experimental java on Gentoo/Alpha
After some work trying to fix compaq-java (see bug 84306) we are nearly sure it is a
waste of time trying to make something unsupported upstream and obsolete
(provide jre/jdk-1.3) work.
After some experiences with SableVM, Thomas Cort (tcort) has been playing with lastest version
of this free alternative to make java work on Alpha. SableVM seems to work
with basic packages so, our plan is to set up an overlay and start playing
with this.
More info about Thomas' current work:
Alpha Arch testers Project
Fernando J. Pereda (ferdy) is working
these days on setting up our Arch Testers project which has given very good
results on other arch teams inside Gentoo (mainly amd64).
For more information, you can read the overview on the amd64 arch
testers' project page to see what this project is about:
Future change on the Alpha Project Page
We hope to make some changes on our official project page to keep public info
well structured and a bit more updated than it is now. Also starting
subproject sections with information about arch testers, SELinux and
java would be good.
The contents of this document are licensed under the Creative Commons -
Attribution / Share Alike license.
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