Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 9:26 AM Måns Rullgård <mans@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> Anyone running an Alpha machine likely also has some old OSF/1 binaries >> they may wish to use. It would be a shame to remove this feature, IMO. > > If that's the case then we'd have to keep a.out alive for alpha, since > that's the OSF/1 binary format (at least the only one we support - I'm > not sure if later versions of OSF/1 ended up getting ELF). The latest version I have is 5.1, and that uses ECOFF. > Which I guess we could do, but the question is whether people really > do have OSF/1 binaries. It was really useful early on as a source of > known-good binaries to test with, but I'm not convinced it's still in > use. > > It's not like there were OSF/1 binaries that we didn't havce access to > natively (well, there _were_ special ones that didn't have open source > versions, but most of them required more system-side support than > Linux ever implemented, afaik). I don't have any specific examples, but I can well imagine people keeping an Alpha machine for no other reason than the ability to run some (old) application only available (to them) for OSF/1. Running them on Linux rather than Tru64 brings the advantage of being a modern system in other regards. For anything open source, there's little reason to keep the Alpha at all. -- Måns Rullgård
