Future direction for Fedora on Power
Hello friends of the PowerPC and Power architectures,
As you likely know our Fedora on Power project is driven by a small
team of Red Hat and IBM employees with occasional collaboration from
the broader community. And we have to think about our priorities when
our resources are limited. Currently we care about 2 architectures,
ppc64 and ppc64le, they are both using the same ISA, but yet different
ABIs.
The facts about the current situation and an outlook into the future is
- IBM is focusing on the ppc64le variant in all new Linux developments
[1]
- all new hardware (Power or OpenPower based) is capable of running in
little endian mode
We can look at Golang as an example where the ppc64 port is not on-par
with the ppc64le one in features (it lacks some). This can lead to a
situation where we will have to drop ppc64 from the supported Golang
architectures and make ppc64 Fedora port less complete. We expect
similar situation with other projects where there is no sustained
effort to support ppc64.
As a result we want to transfer the ppc64 port into a maintenance mode.
It means new features, that we plan for ppc64le, won't be enabled for
ppc64 (eg. Atomic Host compose) or it may even lose some features in
the time (eg. disable the whole golang-* stack). There is currently no
plan to remove ppc64 as a Fedora architecture under the community
control, it will only receive less attention than ppc64le.
With regards
Dan on behalf of the Fedora on Power team
[1]
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/fe313521-2e95-46f2-817...