Re: Status of debian-installer for the native ppc64 port
On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 11:45:00AM +0200, Andreas Jochens wrote:
> Hello,
For info, i just did a debian install on IBM JS21 blades. More bug reports
will follow later on, but basically it worked nicely, except for
yaboot-installer, and the console kernel setting, which should be added to the
yaboot config if found on the kernel cmd line.
> Holger Levsen wrote:
> > which solution do you think is better? the cross-installer (isnt there
> < one for amd64 already?) or the native installer?
>
> There is currently no cross-installer for amd64 as far as I know.
>
> There is not even a 64-bit kernel flavor in the i386 repository.
> There was one some time ago but it has been discontinued.
>
> I do not think that there is a 'better' solution. Both solutions
> have their place. The amd64 native 64-bit installer should not be
> dropped just because the i386 32-bit installer can be used to
> cross-install amd64. The same is true for the ppc64 case in my opinion.
You can't compare amd64 with powerpc64. amd64 is a *HUGE* improvement above
the ia32 situation, due to the abysmal register situation of ia32 (2 op of
which one is a destination operands, 6 usable registers). This benefit is not
there on powerpc64, and there is absolutely no reason to run native 64bit code
in the installer, except it will make for bigger and slower binaries (due to
the pointers doubling size mostly). The only reason to do native 64bit on
powerpc is if you want to address more than 4GB of memory, and the day the
installer will need > 4GB of ram, then something would have gone seriously
wrong :)
This is not my position, but all other binary distros (redhat, suse/novell) go
this way, and the main linux/powerpc upstream porters, among them, those who
work for IBM and should know, are of this opinion.
So, it may have some benefit for the actual installed userland to go the
true-64bit way, altough even that is doubtful compared to a biarch/multi-arch
solution, but for the installer, there is no such reason, and the cross
installation is much more interesting.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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