On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Dan Horák dan@danny.cz wrote:
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?
we can decide it ourselves now, so I'd go with 2 branches - ppc (32-bit) to satisfy people with eg. Mac G4 hardware and ppc64 (with 64-bit as preferred and 32-bit as compat, it's a known fact that Fedora serves as RHEL upstream) for G5s and IBM servers/workstations.
I think it would be beneficial to spend a bit of time documenting the supported hardware and composition going forward. I have no personal preference on the bit-size issue, but it wasn't communicated on the list prior to my asking.
Additional items to cover are:
1) 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.
2) 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).
3) Which arch is the primary on 64-bit (seems ppc64)
josh