Re: Proposal for new architecture support/distribution
"Phillip R. Jaenke" <debian@eiterra.nls.net> writes:
> Kernel and hardware incompatibilities can lead to binary
> incompatibilities.
> Plus, IIRC, the current PowerPC distributions are all
> compiled for UP. As I said, most RS/6000's are SMP.
You'd have a separate RS/6000 kernel which would be compiled for SMP.
This should have no impact on the existing PPC userspace.
The userspace stuff shouldn't care if it's running on UP or
SMP. Remember, i386 supports UP and SMP with one userspace.
> And a multi-threaded application will still work on a UP system, of
> course. Another reason is due to the almost totally commercial use
> of the RS/6000. Unlike your standard Linux distribution, to actually
> make headway in the RS/6000 arena, it would require a focus more on
> applications that are used in the server market; ie, Apache, SSL
> webservers, NFS, Samba, and commercial applications such as Oracle,
> etc, providing an 'official' distribution for the RS/6000 convinces
> them to port to said distribution.
Debian already has all these applications (except for Oracle).
Basically, all Debian distributions look the same, regardless of the
underlying architecture - because they are built from the same set of
sources.
Cheers,
- Jim
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