Fedora PPC status & work in progress :)

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2011-04-28 at 13:36 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
> 
> 
> Additional items to cover are:
> 
> 1) Are ppc32 machines supported?  Specifically I'm thinking of Apple
> G4 machines, but we used to build a bunch of Freescale device drivers
> and such as well for machines in the 6xx class.

We should definitely continue to support ppc32 machines. There are a
*lot* of embedded ppc32 machines around.

> 2) Which machine type are supported?  Seems POWER7, possibly POWER6
> and 5.  I would imagine we would want to explicitly drop PS3 support
> given it's limited memory (vs initrd) and the fact that it's not
> really sustainable as a machine due to firmware changes.  However, do
> we support Apple G5 and Powerstation machines?  (I think yes, but it's
> unclear).

I think we should, yes. These things aren't that hard to support.

We should try to avoid *actively* dropping things that used to work.

> 3) Which arch is the primary on 64-bit (seems ppc64)

Ick, I really don't like that decision. The 32-bit userspace is *so*
much better tested, and isn't register-starved like certain other
architectures in 32-bit mode, so the major benefit of 64-bit mode just
isn't there.

But I suppose given that IBM have driven it through for RHEL and SLES,
64-bit userspace will be getting somewhat more testing.

What packages still *don't* build in the 64-bit versions, and would be
missing (or bizarrely 32-bit-only) if we have 64-bit as the primary arch
on ppc64?

We were typically just not caring about the PPC64 ExcludeArch tracker
bug, although I have a distinct recollection of getting drunk in a
Shanghai hotel room at one point and doing OCaml support. Is that still
in the Fedora packages?

-- 
dwmw2