Charles said:

> Linus gave a talk here at MIT a few years ago, shortly after the Alpha
> port was initially released.  I asked him how long it took.  The
> answer was 7 months.  Now, consider that this was to an EISA-based
> machine (the Jensen, I think), for which almost all of the devices
> were already `supported' by Linux already.
> 
> By contrast, our Alpha port was up and running fairly reliably in 3
> months.  It was initially done on TurboChannels machines (which,
> AFAIK, you folks *still* don't run on), which required writing a
> considerable amount of new device support.
> 
> `Which approach took less time?'

1. You have to keep in mind that for Linux, the Alpha was the first
   port.  Before this, the Linux kernel only ran on the Intel. 

2. At that same time, NetBSD had already been ported to several
   architectures.  I believe the sparc, the m68k and the mips ports
   already existed at this point.

So, you can not really compare them.  For Linux it was a major design
change; for NetBSD, it probablyf meant adding a couple of
subdirectories and the support for 64 bit address space.

I also believe that you already had TurboChannel device drivers at
that time, but I may be wrong (isn't that what the decstations use?).

If you want to be fair, you can look at the time it took at the
UltraPenguin team to get up the 64-bit port of Linux on the
UltraSPARC: about 2 months would seem right.  A complete Linux/Ultra
userland was available three months later.  A full 64 bit userland is
almost finished now (which included, improving gcc, binutils and
fixing the SPARC v9 ELF64 standard). 

So far, I have not seen anything that proves that technically, it was
a bad decision but all the contrary.

best wishes,
Miguel.
-- 
miguel@kernel.org