Fedora PPC status & work in progress :)

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 9:15 AM, Phil Knirsch <pknirsch at 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