Re: Compatible Debian PPC64 B.E for L.E servers
On 10/26/20 4:55 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> And it seems power8+ machines really just run ppc64el because that is
> what IBM wants people to run (apparently because converting the data from
> big endian to little endian before passing it to an nvidia GPU that only
> does little endian made a significant performance difference and there
> was no reason not to switch to little endian given almost all powerpc
> designs support both ways, not to mention the amount of software that
> is broken on big endian because of assumptions (often implicit) by
> the developers).
I had to re-read this several times and just to be clear: You can still
run big-endian code perfectly fine on POWER8 machines and newer (unless
IBM removed support with POWER10).
In fact, we are running the little-endian port on the POWER8 server we got
from IBM to host two ppc64 big-endian KVM VMs (one buildd and one Debian
porterbox). Although that causes the host kernel to crash regularly with
no fix in sight yet, unfortunately [1].
Adrian
> [1] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206669
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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