F29 System Wide Change: Discontinue PPC64 as Alternative Architecture

[Jan Kurik]

= Proposed System Wide Change: Discontinue PPC64 as Alternative Architecture =
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DiscontinuePPC64


Owner(s):
  * Dan Horák <sharkcz at fedoraproject dot org>


After a number of projects dropped support for the big endian ppc64
architecture and our move of ppc64 to "maintenance-only" mode few
releases back, now a vital dependency, the Eclipse project, stops
supporting ppc64. As a consequence we need to discontinue producing
any ppc64 content. This is a long time anticipated step as the
upstream focus on the little endian variant (ppc64le) on Linux is well
known. My email
[https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]...]
sent to the Fedora PPC mailing list has few more details.


== Detailed description ==
Fedora will stop producing ppc64 content - binary rpms or composes.


== Scope ==
* Proposal owners:
synchronize with rel-engs

* Other developers:
none

* Release engineering:
#7602 [https://pagure.io/releng/issues/7602]  changes in koji, bodhi
and pungi configurations are expected

** List of deliverables:
N/A

* Policies and guidelines:
none

* Trademark approval:
N/A (not needed for this Change)
-- 
Jan Kuřík
JBoss EAP Program Manager
Red Hat Czech s.r.o., Purkynova 99/71, 612 45 Brno, Czech Republic

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

> >>>> "JK" == Jan Kurik <jkurik(a)redhat.com&gt;
> writes: 
JK> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DiscontinuePPC64

This may be necessary, but it's sadly unfortunate as (so far as I can
tell) it leaves us with only one big-endian architecture (s390x).  And
while it was not difficult to get a login on a ppc64 machine for
testing, I've not been able to get any shell access on s390x so far.

Having builds done on big-endian architectures has helped to point out
endianness-specific breakage with least one upsteam (which, hooray, did
get fixed).  Having only one big-endian architecture makes it difficult
to know when you are facing an endianness problem versus something
specific to one architecture.  I think we can all agree that "your code
is broken on all big-endian architectures" sounds serious while "your
code is broken on this weird mainframe thing that nobody actually has"
is far less likely to elicit action by a time-constrained upstream.

 - J<

[Dan Horák]

On Mon, 02 Jul 2018 12:57:41 -0500
Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs(a)math.uh.edu&gt; wrote:

>  >>>>> "JK" == Jan Kurik
> <jkurik(a)redhat.com&gt; writes:
>  
>  JK> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DiscontinuePPC64
>  
>  This may be necessary, but it's sadly unfortunate as (so far as I can
>  tell) it leaves us with only one big-endian architecture (s390x).  And
>  while it was not difficult to get a login on a ppc64 machine for
>  testing, I've not been able to get any shell access on s390x so far. 
Then I had to miss your request, we have a public s390x guest running
Fedora that can be used by maintainers and also by interested
upstreams. I'll get back to you next week, when I'll be back in the
office. 

>  Having builds done on big-endian architectures has helped to point
> out
>  endianness-specific breakage with least one upsteam (which, hooray,
>  did get fixed).  Having only one big-endian architecture makes it
>  difficult to know when you are facing an endianness problem versus
>  something specific to one architecture.  I think we can all agree
>  that "your code is broken on all big-endian architectures" sounds
>  serious while "your code is broken on this weird mainframe thing that
>  nobody actually has" is far less likely to elicit action by a
>  time-constrained upstream. 
I fully understand, ppc64 is/was easier to get access to and I'm sure
there are still projects with endianness issues. Although the situation
is much much better than when we (re)started Fedora for ppc/ppc64 and
s390/s390x cca 10 years ago. Our thanks go also to the Fedora
maintainer community for the great job they are doing. The Linux on
Power upstream set the directions quite clearly towards ppc64le and it
was matter of time when individual projects' upstreams will discontinue
ppc64 support and we will have to react. Also the complexity of the
dependencies inside Fedora added to this decision.


		Dan