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
