Mailing List Archive

Alpha status Dec 2005
Note: This doc can be found on Gentoo/Alpha web site[1] and is also
available in guidexml version [2].

Alpha status Dec 2005
=====================

A little report about how the alpha arch team development activities are
going.

Index:

- Toolchain and Kernel development
- Security Bugs
- SELinux development
- Modular Xorg on Gentoo/Alpha
- Experimental java on Gentoo/Alpha
- Alpha arch testers project
- Future Alpha project page

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 "Threads defuncts on Alpha" bug (#100259).
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:
- https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4928

Stefaan also has a tinderbox to check modular xorg on alpha:
- http://tinderbox.anholt.net/tinderbox3/showbuilds.pl?tree=xorg

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:
- http://mediumbagel.org/java/

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:
- http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/amd64/tests/index.xml

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.

- (current page) http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/

------------------------
Gentoo Alpha Herd
Dec 2005

[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/status/status-20051207.txt
[2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/status/status-20051207.xml
--
gentoo-alpha@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: Alpha status Dec 2005 [ In reply to ]
Jose, thank you for this very useful document!

I don't know if comments to this document are desired, but I will do it
anyway...

On Wed, 07 Dec 2005 21:20:21 +0100
Jose Luis Rivero <yoswink@gentoo.org> wrote:

<snip>

> 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.

Fully acke'd. I share your opinion.

>
> 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.

Thanks to Thomas for his work.
What does overlay mean? virtual/jre and virtual/jdk? That would be very
nice.
I have installed sablevm a few weeks ago and I'm running tomcat with it.
Seems to be working fine here.

>
> More info about Thomas' current work:
> - http://mediumbagel.org/java/
>
> Alpha Arch testers Project
> --------------------------

I'll have to look into this one...

Marc

>
> 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:
> - http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/amd64/tests/index.xml
>
> 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.
>
> - (current page) http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/
>
> ------------------------
> Gentoo Alpha Herd
> Dec 2005
>
> [1]
> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/status/status-20051207.txt
> [2]
> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/status/status-20051207.xml
> --
> gentoo-alpha@gentoo.org mailing list
>
--
gentoo-alpha@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: Alpha status Dec 2005 [ In reply to ]
> What does overlay mean? virtual/jre and virtual/jdk?
A portage overlay is sort of like /usr/portage, but for third party
ebuilds. See [1] and [2] for more info. This overlay will include new
ebuilds, ebuilds in progress, and existing ebuilds relating to java
and sablevm/sablevm-sdk. sablevm-sdk is not in portage yet, but an
ebuild for it exists[3]. It provides virtual/jdk, however sablevm-sdk
is missing some features (tools.jar) and the ebuild needs some work
(for example, if USE="-nogjdoc" then sablevm-sdk depends on antlr
which depends on virtual/jdk).

I'm a student and have exams this week, but starting on Saturday
afternoon I'll have a lot more free time for Gentoo stuff. Keep
checking my java notes page[4]; when I have an overlay ready I'll post
its location there along with re-written and expanded notes.

[1] http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Installing_3rd_Party_Ebuilds
[2] http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Overlays
[3] http://gentooexperimental.org/svn/java/gentoo-java-experimental
/dev-java/sablevm-sdk/
[4] http://mediumbagel.org/java/

--
gentoo-alpha@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: Alpha status Dec 2005 [ In reply to ]
Jose Luis Rivero wrote:

> Alpha status Dec 2005

[snip!]

I'd like to sneak in here and say a huge "Thank you"
to all the gentoo-alpha guys. Without you, my Alpha
would be living in a dumpster.

Thanks for all the hard work, we Alpha users really
appreciate it.

Andrew.
--
gentoo-alpha@gentoo.org mailing list