2.6.2.4 Linux Alpha Notes

MySQL Version 3.23.12 is the first MySQL version that is tested on Linux-Alpha. If you plan to use MySQL on Linux-Alpha, you should ensure that you have this version or newer.

We have tested MySQL on Alpha with our benchmarks and test suite, and it appears to work nicely.

We currently build the MySQL binary packages on SuSE Linux 7.0 for AXP, kernel 2.4.4-SMP, Compaq C compiler (V6.2-505) and Compaq C++ compiler (V6.3-006) on a Compaq DS20 machine with an Alpha EV6 processor.

You can find the above compilers at http://www.support.compaq.com/alpha-tools/. By using these compilers, instead of gcc, we get about 9-14% better performance with MySQL.

Note that until MySQL version 3.23.52 and 4.0.2 we optimised the binary for the current CPU only (by using the -fast compile option); this meant that you could only use our binaries if you had an Alpha EV6 processor.

Starting with all following releases we added the -arch generic flag to our compile options, which makes sure the binary runs on all Alpha processors. We also compile statically to avoid library problems.

CC=ccc CFLAGS="-fast -arch generic" CXX=cxx \
CXXFLAGS="-fast -arch generic -noexceptions -nortti" \
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql --disable-shared \
--with-extra-charsets=complex --enable-thread-safe-client \
--with-mysqld-ldflags=-non_shared --with-client-ldflags=-non_shared

If you want to use egcs the following configure line worked for us:

CFLAGS="-O3 -fomit-frame-pointer" CXX=gcc \
CXXFLAGS="-O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -felide-constructors \
-fno-exceptions -fno-rtti" ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql \
--disable-shared

Some known problems when running MySQL on Linux-Alpha:

• Debugging threaded applications like MySQL will not work with gdb 4.18. You should download and use gdb 5.1 instead!
• If you try linking mysqld statically when using gcc, the resulting image will core dump at start. In other words, don't use --with-mysqld-ldflags=-all-static with gcc.

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