Fedora PPC status & work in progress :)

[Karsten Hopp]

Am 28.04.2011 20:24, schrieb 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).
>


Well, as I have an Apple G5 and even created the mentioned DVD iso on it
I will be quite unhappy if I can't install the latest Fedora on it.
Looks good so far, even the big initrd isn't an issue on that machine as long
as I don't try a network install (tftp limitations)

.....

> 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?
 >

Fortunately your ppc64 ocaml patch still works, although it got deleted on
the primary archs.
You don't happen to be in Germany anytime soon ? If getting you drunk results
in a 64bit yaboot I'm sure I'll find a nice pub somewhere around here ;-)

Creating 64bit images with an additional 32bit glibc just for yaboot is
suboptimal, but seems to work so far.
I stil need to convince mash to pull that in during the compose, though.
I'd appreciate it if someone could have a look at yaboot, but if that's too
much work we can keep it that way while waiting for grub2.


     Karsten