Re: Installation guide architecture table update

I am not sure if it is relevant but there seems to be an issue with the nouveau driver and Jessie.

Older iMacG5's with NVidia cards need the nouveau driver but the driver seems to have an issue with large pages that are apparently used in Jessie and Stretch.

I have my iMac G5 running MintPPC 11 (which is based on Wheezy) but the performance is so low as to be unusable as a desktop machine for my kids. I can load a test version of Stretch if there is one that is supposed to fix the nouveau issue.

It might be worth a note that using the nouveau driver with Stretch on PowerPC is not likely to work.

Note: I would like it to work so if some type of help is needed to get it working I would assist. I don't know the details of the PowerPC kernel nor the nouveau driver; however, working on this would certainly be a way to learn...

On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 9:23 AM, Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:

On Wed, 2016-06-29 at 14:38 +0200, Karsten Merker wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have pushed some updates to the architecture table in the
> installation guide for stretch, based on the available flavors in the
> current kernel package builds, currently-built d-i targets, information
> in wiki.d.o and data from the architecture qualification status page
> (https://release.debian.org/stretch/arch_qualify.html). The result
> is available at:
>
> https://jenkins.debian.net/userContent/installation-guide/installation-guide-armhf/en/ch02s01.html#idm189
>
> I am not particularly familiar with the state of affairs on mips/mipsel
> and powerpc, so it would be nice if the mips/mipsel and powerpc porters
> could take a look and let me know if something is wrong or missing.
>
> I haven't listed mips64el in the table as it is not yet confirmed
> as a release architecture for Stretch on release.debian.org.
>
> For powerpc it would be nice to have some information about which kind
> of systems are still supported as the previously-existing pmac and prep
> flavors don't get built anymore. Is CHRP the only remaining powerpc
> platform?

If I understand correctly, later Power Macs and IBM Power systems are
compatible with CHRP, and that is the only platform supported. But I
don't think the term CHRP is widely understood so there is little point
in mentioning it.

However, there are separate powerpc and powerpc64 subarchitectures
because (if I remember correctly) 32-bit kernels won't run on 64-bit
firmware.

> For mipsel, the kernel builds loongson-2e and loongson-2f flavors, but
> we don't seem to build any installer images for them. I dimly remember
> having heard something about loongson-2 support being phased out - can
> somebody provide information on that?

Starting with Linux 4.7 we are not building kernels for them.

Also, there are no installer builds with the 5kc-malta kernel flavour, since the 4kc-malta flavour runs on all the same hardware.

You didn't ask about ARM and x86, but:

- On armel, kirkwood and orion5x are still separate subarchitectures
even though they use the same kernel flavour
- On armhf, there is no armmp-lpae subarchitecture, because all
hardware that can run the armmp-lpae kernel can also run the armmp
kernel
- On i386, there is a separate 'xen' subarchitecture for Xen PV
domains, using the 686-pae kernel flavour

Ben.

--

Ben Hutchings
Make three consecutive correct guesses and you will be considered an
expert.