Re:The Death of Alpha on NT (1999)
by LukeShu on Saturday June 26, 2021 @12:25AM
(#27639102)
The Alpha folks talk about being the first port away from x86, but Linux/m68k (1993) predates the Alpha port (1995). I guess the difference is that m68k was happening independently and lived out-of-tree for a long time, while Alpha was happening with the direct involvement of Linus and lived in-tree from the start.
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I think the Alpha port may have been more significant because it required making Linux work on SMP systems with a very weak memory ordering model, in contrast to x86's strong ordering. I'm not aware of any SMP 68k systems, but that was definitely an important part of the Alpha ecosystem.