Alpha/Linux Wiki

This page gives a short history of Linux on Alpha, from Digital's first port in 1994 to the present. The companies involved are described under Companies, the distributions under Distributions, and the mailing lists and Gentoo's port under Community History.

Linux on Alpha began at Digital with a 32-bit port of Linux 1.0 by Jim Paradis and his colleagues, which led to the Linux/Alpha Software Developers' Kit in January 1995; see Operating Systems: The first port. At the same time, Linus Torvalds was working in Helsinki on a 64-bit Alpha port of his own, on Alpha systems lent by Digital. In March 1995 he announced that his port was self-hosting. It ran the compilers from Digital UNIX, because he had made its system calls compatible with those of Digital UNIX, and Digital's team then moved from its own 32-bit kernel to his 64-bit code. ¹⁾ Digital showed the self-hosting system at DECUS in May 1995. ²⁾

Alpha code was already in Torvalds's own kernel tree during the 1.1 and 1.2 series, but the published kernel change summaries left it out "until the respective port is working". ³⁾ Digital's BLADE 0.1, released in July 1995, used a 1.2.8 kernel with "Linus' Alpha patches" applied. ⁴⁾ The same month, the summaries began listing the Alpha changes in the mainline 1.3 development kernels. ⁵⁾ Linux 2.0, released in June 1996, was the first stable kernel to support Alpha directly: "The standard Linux-2.0 kernel directly supports both intel x86 (and clones) and Digital Alpha machines." ⁶⁾

Red Hat released its first Alpha distribution in December 1995 and its first official one in January 1996; see Companies: Red Hat.

The early Alpha/Linux userland used the ECOFF object format, as Digital UNIX did, and an older C library. In June 1996 David Mosberger-Tang was preparing "the transition from ECOFF/oldlibc to ELF/glibc". ⁷⁾ Red Hat Linux 4.0, released for Alpha in October 1996, ⁸⁾ was ELF-based, so ECOFF-only commercial software, such as Metro Link's Motif, could no longer be linked on it. ⁹⁾

In January 1997, glibc 2.0.1 changed the Alpha ABI, and Alpha's C library was renamed libc.so.6.1 to keep binaries built against the old library from loading the new one. Alpha still uses that name; see Why Alpha Has libc.so.6.1.

During the Linux 2.1 development series, Compaq's Alpha Linux engineers had SMP support that "seemed pretty stable" on the Rawhide, Sable, and DP264 platforms, and were working on the generic kernel, one kernel that runs on many Alpha systems. ¹⁰⁾ Compaq gave Torvalds an AlphaServer DS20 at LinuxWorld in March 1999. ¹¹⁾ In 2000 a Linux 2.4 kernel ran on all 16 processors of an AlphaServer GS160. ¹²⁾

This was the period of the most commercial support. Red Hat, SuSE, MandrakeSoft, and TurboLinux all released Alpha versions, and Compaq released its C and Fortran compilers and math library for Alpha/Linux; see Companies: Compaq. Debian first released Alpha as an official architecture in Debian 2.1 (1999). ¹³⁾

Compaq announced in June 2001 that it would sell its Alpha technology to Intel (see Companies: Compaq). The commercial distributions left Alpha in the following years. Red Hat Linux 7.2 was Red Hat's last Alpha release, and in 2002 its Alpha CD was sold only by HP, without support. ¹⁴⁾ SuSE discontinued SuSE Linux 7.1, its last Alpha release, in May 2003. ¹⁵⁾ The last releases of each distribution are listed under Distributions.

HP canceled the EV79 in October 2003 and replaced it with the EV7z, ¹⁶⁾ which arrived in 1.15 GHz and 1.3 GHz versions in 2004 as the last Alpha processor. ¹⁷⁾ HP released the last Alpha firmware update, V7.3, in April 2007. ¹⁸⁾ HP's commitments on Alpha are described under Companies: Hewlett-Packard.

Debian 5.0 (2009) was the last Debian release for Alpha. ¹⁹⁾ In October 2009 Debian's release team demoted Alpha as a release architecture for Debian 6.0, ²⁰⁾ and the port continued unofficially in Debian Ports.

From 2009 the port was maintained by volunteers. In October 2009 fixes by Michael Cree and Matt Turner made the X server work on Alpha again, after a change made during the development of xorg-server 1.6 had broken it; ²¹⁾ the fixes were released in xorg-server 1.7.1. ²²⁾ In November 2009 Torvalds began pulling Alpha patches from a tree kept by Turner, starting with Linux 2.6.32. ²³⁾ Linux 2.6.36 removed the Big Kernel Lock from arch/alpha ²⁴⁾ and fixed a signal handling bug in sigreturn() tracing present since Linux 1.3.95. ²⁵⁾ In December 2011 Uros Bizjak fixed GCC bug 27468, which made GCC emit unnecessary sign-extending instructions on Alpha, for GCC 4.7. ²⁶⁾ Linux 3.5 implemented more OSF/1 system calls, improving the kernel's ability to run Tru64 UNIX binaries. ²⁷⁾

The toolchain lost ground elsewhere. LLVM removed its Alpha back end in 2011, ²⁸⁾ so Clang and Rust are not available on Alpha; see Current Status: What is missing. QEMU, which had emulated Alpha user-mode programs since version 0.9.1, ²⁹⁾ added system emulation of an ES40-class machine in QEMU 1.0. ³⁰⁾ Debian's Alpha port now builds packages on QEMU as well as on real hardware; see Emulators: QEMU.

Linux 6.10, released in July 2024, removed support for the EV4, EV45, and EV5 processors, because the kernel needs the byte/word extension (BWX) to make byte and word stores atomic. ^{31) 32)} Current kernels require an EV56 or later; see Current Status: Processor baseline. The current maintainers and the state of each project are listed on Current Status, and the history of Gentoo's port under Community History.