base kernel to build fedora

[Josh Boyer]

On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 11:31:09PM +0200, Tomasz Torcz wrote:
>On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 01:14:07PM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
>> On Mon, 2010-05-24 at 13:01 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>> > On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 04:45:49PM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>> > > People already ready run scripts to look for FTBFS packages now. Having to
>> > > deal with all of these at once would be a real problem. Doing this this way
>> > > allows us to spread out the fixing over time.
>> > 
>> > The problem isn't FTBFS packages, but packages that require devious
>> > workarounds because Koji isn't quite like any other distro out there.
>> > 
>> > Koji is a Fedora userspace running on top of a RHEL 5 kernel.  This
>> > tests out all sorts of strange and interesting paths inside glibc,
>> > because glibc emulates a lot of system calls which didn't exist in
>> > RHEL 5.  While extra testing is usually great, it's not clear that
>> > dumping this testing on to package maintainers is a good thing,
>> > particularly since Koji is about the only real world case where people
>> > actually run mismatched userspace and kernel like this.  (There is no
>> > distro that I know of that advocates running a brand new userspace on
>> > top of an old kernel -- but please correct me if I'm wrong about
>> > that).
>> 
>> While building in vms is starting to make sense on x86, it still doesn't
>> make sense (or not possible) on other arches like ppc, s390, arm, sparc,
>> ia64, etc...  So building for those arches is going to continue to use
>> the mock path, which means if we don't do it for x86, we're going to run
>> into these odd code paths on even "odder" arches and make keeping those
>> up and running even harder.
>
> http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/PowerPC
> http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/ia64/kvm.txt
> http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/s390/kvm.txt
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/arm-kvm/
> + some mail-list disscussion about KVM on SPARC.
>
> It is certainly possible. Often in experimental state, but nevertheless.
>We have the technology for VMs.

Actually, we don't for PowerPC.  Right now, you have two options for virt on
ppc/ppc64:

1) kvm for PPC 440.  Fedora doesn't support PPC 440 (it could, but it's an
embedded CPU and would require yet another kernel.)

2) LPARs for ppc64.  This is actually a bit more feasible, but it requires you
to have a POWER machine with LPAR support configured.  Most of the existing
builders are blades, which generally don't do LPARs.

josh