Fedora 22

[Timo Schöler]

On 12/17/2014 03:23 PM, Peter Robinson wrote:
>>>>>>   We briefly discussed priorities for Fedora 22 and I had taken an
>>>>>> action item to start an email conversation about this.  So here is
>>>>>> what I would like to see for Fedora 22.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 1)  Get the -mcpu and -mtune flags set properly for the LE build.
>>>>>> Should be -mcpu=power7 -mtune=power8
>>>>>
>>>>> done, all packages that honour the Fedora system wide compiler flags
>>>>> use them, if they don't it's a packaging bug
>>>>>
>>>>>> 2) Have a cloud image available
>>>>>> 3) For BE I would like another subarch.  Same packages as the current
>>>>>> one but tuned for P8.
>>>>>
>>>>> you mean in addition to ppc64p7? can't we just switch ppc64p7 from
>>>>> -mcpu=power7 -mtune=power7 to -mcpu=power7 -mtune=power8?
>>>>
>>>> This makes sense to me as it then mirrors what we have in ppc64le and
>>>> it saves having more targets.
>>>
>>> The disadvantage of this would be to cut off users that have Power 7 systems
>>> and optimized code.  So why would people want to optimize from Fedora 21 to
>>> Fedora 22.  You would be taking a big step back in performance.  I don't
>>> want to suggest keeping a subarch for each type of POWER system out
>>> there.  I
>>> was thinking of keeping two.  So when the next POWER arch that comes out,
>>> the Power 7 subarch goes away and you would have Power 8 and the new
>>> Power arch.
>>
>> That would mean that enthusiasts like myself, happily running Fedora on
>> a Power 285 workstation, would lose Fedora?
> 
> No, there's a sub arch called ppc64p7 which provides optimised
> binaries for a sub set of packages which has been a feature for a few
> releases and is what is being discussed with the terms "For BE I would
> like another subarch"

Okay, then I got that wrong.

>> I'd really like to keep it. Red Hat dropped Power5 support quite a time
>> ago, so if there ever comes a CentOS 7 ppc to life, it'd had to be
>> tweaked to run on those machines. *If*, that is. Furthermore, Power6
>> boxes aren't that old, either.
> 
> If there ever was a CentOS7 option for POWER 

There's chatting about this, yes.

Last year I started on porting CentOS 5 onto Power, but got stuck due to
lack of spare time.

> I suspect they would take
> the same options for RHEL, and POWER6 dates back to 06/07 so define
> old.

Sure. At least a Power 5 box isn't that old it would be the same
category as a Sun SPARCstation 20, which is still supported by OpenBSD, e.g.

What may be of importance is that the 285 is the last *real*
workstation, AFAIK.

Would happily buy a new workstation by IBM or the OpenPower consortium,
too! :)

I am indeed just installing Final Release Candidate 6 (RC6)

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ppc/2014-December/003199.html

http://riscworks.net/static/Fedora/f21_285.jpg

>> I just want to emphasize that with keeping "old" metal running (we're
>> not talking of ancient hardware) the useable hardware available for
>> people doing this on a hobbyists scale would be much bigger -- so would
>> be the community. Having Power 7 and Power 8 only, that wouldn't be the
>> case any longer.
> 
> We're not dropping it, we're adjusting the ppc64p7 sub architecture
> for newer stuff, and that sub architecture was always POWER7 it's
> actually just adjusting the processors we optimise for. There is no
> change.
> 
> Peter

Thanks for clarifying this.

Timo


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