ARM as a primary architecture

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Wed Mar 21 12:33:36 UTC 2012


On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 12:12:25PM +0000, Peter Robinson wrote:
> How was this handled in the case of PPC? My understanding is that due
> to legal reasons the Fedora Project never officially provided access
> to PPC machines. There were a number of machines that users could get
> access to that were provided by individuals but these were never
> officially provided by the Fedora project.

It was very unsatisfactory.  I had an account on David Woodhouse's
PPC64 machine -- I think it was a PS3 -- but there was no root access
so I couldn't install packages or test anything that needed root.

> There's a number of cheap hardware becoming available such as the
> Raspberry Pi as well as development boards that are available for
> either purchase or people can apply to be part of a developer program
> to get either discount or free hardware. How was this supported with
> PPC? The PPC hardware was a lot more expensive (either Apple devices
> or IBM) than the readily available ARM devices.

PPC hardware was expensive.  Even the Playstation 3 was an order of
magnitude more expensive than the upcoming ARM hardware.  Of course,
as of *right now*, ARM hardware is also expensive (£250 for a minimal
server).  We are still waiting to see if Raspberry Pi really becomes
mass-produced and available to all for cheap as chips.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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