[fab] Secondary Arches

[Dennis Gilmore]

On Friday 17 November 2006 04:02, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 23:15 -0500, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > > Then look at PPC.  How can you expect me to believe that taking an arch
> > > that _already_ has storage and ISOs and just dropping that off of
> > > fedoraproject.org because the buildsys can now send out shadow builds
> > > is progress?
> >
> > I think that trying to lump PPC in here has perhaps made the issue a
> > little bit more muddled.  So ignore PPC for a minute -- does this not
> > start to improve things for arches like sparc?  It's not the whole
> > answer, but it's a start.
>
> Yes, it _does_ look like a step in the right direction. In the long
> term; when the dust has settled and it actually works.
PPC  probably should be the second step.

> > For PPC, things are a little bit more complicated and it's really just a
> > matter of how much demand the platform is seeing vs the effort required
> > to sustain it.  So does it make things less good for ppc?  Definitely.
>
> Very much so. On the other hand, if we revisit the question in time for
> FC8 _after_ we test the process by bringing Aurora into the fold, then
> it doesn't have to be such a retrograde step for PPC.
i think that is perfectly acceptable.

> > But the impetus isn't the existence of secondary arches and shoving the
> > round peg in the square hole.  Instead, it's the fact that the number of
> > ppc downloads is very small and the community of people actively testing
> > and fixing things is quite small.
>
> Nevertheless, it was my impression that FC6 was the best release we've
> done on PowerPC so far -- so much so that when I managed to snatch some
> time to work on FC6 before its release I actually ended up doing
> Bluetooth stuff rather than anything PPC-specific.
i have FC-6 on a powerbook i use pretty much everyday.  with a small patch to 
xorg-server  i even had compiz running properly. Im very happy with it.  my 
other ppc box  is still running FC-4. 

> FC7 will be even better, and will have support for a set of new and
> interesting hardware.
>
> > If your question is just "why don't the bits end up on fp.org", the
> > reason is purely one of "we're not attacking that problem first".  And
> > realistically, setting the expectation that we're not going to solve
> > that problem in the next six months is a far better thing to do IMHO.
>
> I agree. Although the proposed ArchPolicy is a good idea in principle,
> it's going to take time to put it into practice, and there are a
> _number_ of things that realistically speaking we just aren't going to
> solve in the next six months. So please, let's not hold the FC7/PowerPC
> release hostage to those solutions.
PPC does not need to be.  right now Extras has 3 open power boxes with 4 cpu's 
a piece.  there is no reason for PPC not to be built along with x86_64 and 
i386 on the "internal" buildsys with the hardware we have.  I have a T1000 
and spot has a T2000 that can be used as sparc builders.  between them its 64 
threads.  I'm quite happy to ship mine to Phoenix or have it sit where it is 
and tap into the buildsys. if  it does get shipped to Phoenix we really will 
need to have a vlan for the admin interfaces and move the dracs, etc into it.  
Sun  saw fit to allow only telnet as the network access mechanism to the ALOM 
and these boxes can only be powered on through the ALOM.  I currently limit 
plage to 10 jobs at once  due to the machines single drive.  the T2000 has 2 
drives and can have 4.   if it had 4 drives  i would be quite happy to enable 
24+ builds  on the box at a time. though something like eclipse takes over 8 
hours to build  as it is largely  single threaded.  

As a kind of side note my home connection is about to be upgraded to 
15mbit/1.5mbit  while not great  its three times my current upload speed.  
and will enable builds to be uploaded at something not entirely horrible. 

-- 
 ,-._|\    Dennis Gilmore, RHCE
/      \   Proud Australian
\_.--._/   | Aurora | Fedora |
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