When are Qemu SPARC/PPC coming back?

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 7:29 PM, Nathaniel McCallum
<nathaniel at natemccallum.com> wrote:
> The context for this question can be found here:
> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/virt-maint/2011-March/002289.html
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=679179

> What I'm not fine with is that there seems to be no desire to bring
> these packages back. I spoke with several Red Hat virt people and the
> consensus was that SPARC/PPC "don't work." I beg to differ. I am
> building asm software on them right now. They are an invaluable
> software testing platform, even with their relative age.
>
> So in short, can we please bring back SPARC/PPC? I realize that we'll
> need a bit of build system magickery, but I really think its worth it.

No.  Not magickery.  Basically, it needs a build-able openbios or SLOF
(in the ppc case).  And since Fedora doesn't provide cross
compilation, that is going to be hard to do in this case.

As I see it, there is likely one option.  It is possible that we
leverage the secondary architecture builders for PPC and SPARC and
natively build the code, then allow an exception for i686/x86_64
packages to use that natively built openbios/slof.  It would need
FESCo approval, but exceptions for bootstrapping have been granted
before.

All of this is predicated on someone stepping forward to do the work.
So far, we've found people that don't want to do the work but we need
to work the opposite angle.

josh