Alex,
With all due respect, you do realize that several companies actually still manufacture and sell 32-bit PowerPC processors, correct? Do you think this move will be well-met by them?
With all due respect do you realise we actually dropped support for "32-bit PowerPC processors" for all release post Fedora 20?
Fedora 20 went EOL this week but it was known when Fedora 20 went GA in December of 2013, around 18 months ago, that ppc-32 was EOL. This isn't a shock or unknown, it was widely publicised that that if people were interested in 32 bit PPC in general that they needed to pick up the architecture maintainership, and in fact the kernel hasn't had the bits in place to build for ppc-32 for some time, in the ppc32 case it's merely cleaning up the left over bits of something, in terms of the Fedora kernel, that has long been dead.
Peter
On Jun 26, 2015, at 2:40 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobinson@gmail.com wrote:
Hi All,
If you don't care about powerpc you can stop reading :-)
If you do.... I went to do what I thought was a basic fix up to the kernel builds on POWER to get rid of the last bits of the ppc32 legacy, on my list for some time, and it has become more of a slightly epic slash and burn!
The resulting output kernel configs are for all intents and purpose unchanged but the git diff is some what epic.
The top level of the changes are:
Core changes that apply too all kernels (ppc64/ppc64p7/ppc64le) reside in config-powerpc64-generic
config-powerpc64 -> legacy platforms that are older than POWER7 and their dependencies (here lies the ghosts of PowerPC G5 and friends).
config-powerpc64le and config-powerpc64p7 contain anything specific to POWER7 and newer that might affect older platforms, or LE/BE specific to p7 and later
I've removed anything that pertains to PPC32 and Cell processors (the later were all disabled now anyway) but if the kernel docs were wrong and they do by chance work on some other 64 bit platform that still works do let me know.
So the only thing of real note is the ppc64p7 and ppc64le configs no longer have any old IDE configs enabled or any of the legacy Apple bits pulled in, I don't believe that should cause any pain what so ever, I only bring this up because it's the only thing of note on diffs of before/after resulting config diffs.
So ultimately please test kernel builds going forward. There's a scratch build here [1] until we get an official one to test. There's no perf packages, that appears broeken... even on vanilla pre commit :)
For those that are morbidly interested in the diff (and don't have the Fedora kernel package check out) you can see that here [2].
Ultimately the large git commit looks quite scary but the actual change to the 3 configs are minimal and I believe this should make things cleaner moving forward :-)
I look forward to the testing feedback including any further suggested cleanups to the new configs, oh and please test :-)
Peter
[1] http://ppc.koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=2582705 [2] http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/kernel.git/commit/?id=c9229e16082bdc9b2f7... _______________________________________________ ppc mailing list ppc@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/ppc
On Friday, June 26, 2015, 6:44:15 PM, Peter Robinson wrote:
With all due respect, you do realize that several companies actually still manufacture and sell 32-bit PowerPC processors, correct? Do you think this move will be well-met by them?
This change only affects the Fedora builds, not the support for kernel builds for 32-bit ppc in general. As such it is indeed a reasonable step for Peter to make at this time.
With all due respect do you realise we actually dropped support for "32-bit PowerPC processors" for all release post Fedora 20?
Fedora 20 went EOL this week but it was known when Fedora 20 went GA in December of 2013, around 18 months ago, that ppc-32 was EOL. This isn't a shock or unknown, it was widely publicised that that if people were interested in 32 bit PPC in general that they needed to pick up the architecture maintainership, and in fact the kernel hasn't had the bits in place to build for ppc-32 for some time, in the ppc32 case it's merely cleaning up the left over bits of something, in terms of the Fedora kernel, that has long been dead.
Josh wanted to remove the PPC32 kernal build support last year. At that time, I asked him to keep it in place, and I do still plan to get a ppc32 remix running AFTER I get Mac G5 boot fixed in the main Fedora ppc64 secondary arch.
The PPC64 effort is running late (largely due to limited work time, a lot of things to learn and F20 (build env) having issues after updates that prevented network installs. Peter resolved the latter in April.
The reason Josh wanted it removed was twofold: - It was dead within Fedora AND any ACTIVE remix - It was extremely complex, building both a SMP and non-SMP kernel.
Ubuntu dropped the non-SMP ppc32 kernel from their builds several years ago. Non-SMP ppc32 machines simply use the SMP kernel with 1 CPU at a tiny performance penalty. It saves a lot of build time and complexity! Even IBM did this for AIX 5.1 (as witnessed on my B50 32-bit box).
We do not want to remove all ppc32 support, as a remix should be built with minimum delta from the primary release. In this case, it makes sense.
When I'm actively working on ppc32, I plan to add a new spec patch to do the builds like Ubuntu and will base it on Peter's updates. That would be used for builds of the remix, and would be suitable for inclusion in the main Fedora spec with their review/agreement purely to minimize the deltas from primary release.
On Jun 26, 2015, at 2:40 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobinson@gmail.com wrote:
Hi All,
If you don't care about powerpc you can stop reading :-)
If you do.... I went to do what I thought was a basic fix up to the kernel builds on POWER to get rid of the last bits of the ppc32 legacy, on my list for some time, and it has become more of a slightly epic slash and burn!
The resulting output kernel configs are for all intents and purpose unchanged but the git diff is some what epic.
The top level of the changes are:
Core changes that apply too all kernels (ppc64/ppc64p7/ppc64le) reside in config-powerpc64-generic
config-powerpc64 -> legacy platforms that are older than POWER7 and their dependencies (here lies the ghosts of PowerPC G5 and friends).
config-powerpc64le and config-powerpc64p7 contain anything specific to POWER7 and newer that might affect older platforms, or LE/BE specific to p7 and later
I've removed anything that pertains to PPC32 and Cell processors (the later were all disabled now anyway) but if the kernel docs were wrong and they do by chance work on some other 64 bit platform that still works do let me know.
So the only thing of real note is the ppc64p7 and ppc64le configs no longer have any old IDE configs enabled or any of the legacy Apple bits pulled in, I don't believe that should cause any pain what so ever, I only bring this up because it's the only thing of note on diffs of before/after resulting config diffs.
So ultimately please test kernel builds going forward. There's a scratch build here [1] until we get an official one to test. There's no perf packages, that appears broeken... even on vanilla pre commit :)
For those that are morbidly interested in the diff (and don't have the Fedora kernel package check out) you can see that here [2].
Ultimately the large git commit looks quite scary but the actual change to the 3 configs are minimal and I believe this should make things cleaner moving forward :-)
I look forward to the testing feedback including any further suggested cleanups to the new configs, oh and please test :-)
Peter
[1] http://ppc.koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=2582705 [2] http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/kernel.git/commit/?id=c9229e16082bdc9b2f7...
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Al Dunsmuir -
Peter Robinson