Project:Alpha/Status Reports/20051207

Status report of Gentoo/Alpha Arch Team

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.

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.

Toolchain and Kernel development
Thanks mainly to Bryan Østergaard 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 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 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 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 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:


 * Gentoo/Alpha Modular Xorg Tinderbox

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 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:


 * Java on Gentoo/Alpha report

Alpha Arch testers Project
Fernando J. Pereda 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:


 * Gentoo/AMD64 Testing Docs

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 Gentoo/Alpha Arch Team page

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following authors and editors for their contributions to this guide:


 * Gentoo/Alpha