ppc64 biarch toolchain and 64bit powerpc kernels ...

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

Hello,

Now that sarge is released, and we are concentrating on the upcoming etch
release, as shown with the new c++ toolchain announcement from doko, i plan to
retire the 32bit kernels for power3 and power4, and to pass as soon as
possible to 64bit kernels for those arches.

I have already built a -pseries version, which altough not power4 optimized,
will run on everything but legacy iseries (those predating the power5 ones),
which was successfully tested on both pmacs G5 (a dying race now it seems
though), and IBM power5 boxes (altough the ones with logical partitions still
seem to be somewhat buggy). And plan to do a -legacy-iseries build as well as
a power4 optimized version in the near future.

These kernels where built in a sarge chroot using the ubuntu biarch ppc64
toolchain, and i am already building .udebs for those kernels, as well as
daily d-i images, and have an unofficial .udeb archive which will provide
those .udebs.

I lacked time to patch base-installer and net-fetcher or whatever it is called
to get the .udebs from there though, and would like these packages to get
integrated in sid and then etch as fast as possible, to make testing of this
stuff easier.

So, i would like to ask the debian toolchain maintainers what is the expected
timeframe to get a ppc64 biarch toolchain in sid or even experimental ? Or
should i rely on the ubuntu toolchain, and use that to upload kernels to sid
in the near future ? Together with a statically built procps naturally ?

Friendly,

Sven Luther