Saw this mail on the FreeBSD alpha list a few days ago – unfortunately it seems as if support for the Alpha architecture will be phased out with FreeBSD 7.0.

From John Baldwin:
Alpha was the first non-x86 port that was added to FreeBSD, and as such it has greatly aided the efforts to keep FreeBSD from being too i386-centric. However, recently the Alpha port has not had any active development or maintenance.
...
After considering all of this, it is time to part with Alpha for 7.0 and beyond. At this time it is still planned to provide 6.x releases for FreeBSD/alpha. The code will still be around in CVS history if someone suddenly shows up and fixes a bunch of bugs and/or the architecture is revived. ...

I certainly hope someone steps up to take care of FreeBSD/alpha, as it would be sad to see it consigned to the history books. I’ve never used FreeBSD/alpha seriously (my Alphas run NetBSD), but the more choice there is available in the open source arena the better.

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