[EPEL-devel] Process for supporting of new architectures

[Michael Wolf]

>> Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> ...snip...
>>
>>> > 1) Who is championing an architecture?
>>>
>>> Primarily IBM, but this will widen with the OpenPOWER foundation and
>>> it's members widening and HW from that initiative starting to become
>>> available. In the case of aarch64, if that happens, there will be
>>> similarities through Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG).
>>
>> Would we then have a tracker bug and a way for maintainers to call on
>> these resources when/if their packages don't build?
>>
>>> > 2) Where do developers get access to hardware that they can debug
>>> > issues if they want to.
>>>
>>> I'll let Mike (from IBM) answer this one in detail but there's a
>>> number of Universities hosting publicly accessible instances of HW
>>> with a process in place, Linaro has similar process with access to
>>> aarch64 HW running Fedora releases.
>>
>> This would be good to know.
>>
>>> > 3) How do we remove an architecture for whatever reasons?
[Possible
>>> > ones could be it turns out that CentOS i686 is dropped after one
>>> > subrelease... or PPC64be is dropped by IBM because everyone moved
>>> > to PPC64le. Or Itanium3 comes out and no one wants x86_64.]
>>>
>>> I don't see that would be any different to how we dropped PPC from
>>> mainline Fedora back in the F-12/13 timeframe but the architectures,
>>> once added to core RHEL, will be supported for the lifecycle of RHEL
>>> so I don't see that this process would be any different to how we
>>> dropped i686 or any of the 32 bit architectures in the transition
from
>>> el6 -> el7. I personally don't think it's actually worth expending
too
>>> much time on this process until the issue arises, cross the bridge
>>> when we get there so to speak.
>>
>> I'm assuming we would keep ppc64 around too for now on the rhel's we
>> support?
>>
>> ...snip...
>>
>>> I don't see those issues any different to any of the other
>>> architectures or hardware that's needed to run Fedora infrastructure
>>> whether it be servers, storage or network. We have Enterprise
support
>>> on the HW with all due process.
>>
>> Well, we don't have any ppc-le builders currently for EPEL.
>> I guess this would need to be figured out off list first?
>>
>> We do have secondary arch Fedora ones, but the EPEL builders are in
the
>> primary koji, so they would need to be their own thing and have
>> support, etc. I dont think we want to share builders with Fedora
>> secondary ppc...
>>
>> We can figure this out off list tho.
>
>Some of the new P8 hardware that was recently racked is intended to be
>for EPEL on ppc64/ppc64le, I just need to get it configured and build
>VMs done etc

Just out of curiosity how many systems are currently in place to do the
EPEL builds for BE ppc64?  

>
>>> From an infrastructure PoV the advantage that Power8 hardware has is
>>> that it's much closer to x86 in a number of ways and it'll enable us
>>> to mimic the deployment of things like virt builders in a single
>>> contiguous manner across all architectures to enable more simplified
>>> standardised manner to ease burden and increase automation from an
>>> infra Pov