On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 9:15 AM, Phil Knirsch <pknirsch(a)redhat.com> wrote:
Hi everyone.
Just wanted to give you all a brief heads up that Fedora on PPC as a
secondary arch is still alive and kicking and no dead horse!
On a more serious note, we've recently been catching up to the current
Fedora 15 packages after PowerPC moved to secondary arch status after
Fedora 12. This took a while, but thanks to pretty powerful builders and
concentrated effort from the PowerPC team we've gotten pretty close to
catching up by now.
The current focus is to get the installer to work properly again. With
the switch to Lorax, the new unified initrd and other changes we hit a
few problems recently, but at least we've had a successful install with
the latest mash trees on a Power7 machine recently via DVD [1].
Discussions are still ongoing on how to solve the unified initrd size
problem though as currently for Power6 or Power5 the new initrd is just
too large to ever work, even if it would be better compressed. So we
might have to go back to a 2 stage install process for PowerPC at least,
but very likely with a dracut based 1st stage then.
As noted on IRC, the DVD doesn't support ppc32 machines. Are those
being dropped, or is it simply a temporary omission?
On a similar note, it seems the preference for packages is now ppc64
whereas in prior Fedora releases ppc was the perferred arch, even on
64-bit machines. RHEL 6 (and SLES 11) have made that changed, but it
was rejected by FESCo prior to PowerPC being dropped as a primary
architecture. Has the preference changed to 64-bit permanently?
josh