On Thu, 2011-04-28 at 13:36 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
Additional items to cover are:
- Are ppc32 machines supported? Specifically I'm thinking of Apple
G4 machines, but we used to build a bunch of Freescale device drivers and such as well for machines in the 6xx class.
We should definitely continue to support ppc32 machines. There are a *lot* of embedded ppc32 machines around.
- Which machine type are supported? Seems POWER7, possibly POWER6
and 5. I would imagine we would want to explicitly drop PS3 support given it's limited memory (vs initrd) and the fact that it's not really sustainable as a machine due to firmware changes. However, do we support Apple G5 and Powerstation machines? (I think yes, but it's unclear).
I think we should, yes. These things aren't that hard to support.
We should try to avoid *actively* dropping things that used to work.
- Which arch is the primary on 64-bit (seems ppc64)
Ick, I really don't like that decision. The 32-bit userspace is *so* much better tested, and isn't register-starved like certain other architectures in 32-bit mode, so the major benefit of 64-bit mode just isn't there.
But I suppose given that IBM have driven it through for RHEL and SLES, 64-bit userspace will be getting somewhat more testing.
What packages still *don't* build in the 64-bit versions, and would be missing (or bizarrely 32-bit-only) if we have 64-bit as the primary arch on ppc64?
We were typically just not caring about the PPC64 ExcludeArch tracker bug, although I have a distinct recollection of getting drunk in a Shanghai hotel room at one point and doing OCaml support. Is that still in the Fedora packages?