Re: Debian 11 ppc64be

[Dennis Clarke <dclarke@blastwave.org>]

On 10/26/20 12:07 PM, Karl wrote:
> Thanks for the answer. Anything else would have surprised me.
> 
>> Am 26.10.2020 um 16:42 schrieb Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca>:
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 12:34:49AM +0100, Karl wrote:
>>> will there be a Debian 11 release for PPC64be again or is it Sid?
>>> Because on that site, it’s listed as available: https://openpower.ic.unicamp.br/minicloud/
>>
>> I don't recall ppc64 ever being an official released architecture.
>> ppc was but no longer is, and ppc64el is.
>>
>> I would guess they are running the ports ppc64 build, which could
>> certainly be a build matching Debian 11.
>>
>> -- 
>> Len Sorensen
> 

Provided you don't mind the power usage you may run Debian sid on an old
Apple Power Mac machine just fine. In fact the Power Mac quad has decent
performance and it is great to have around for doing code test work as
it is big endian and has a native 65536 byte memory page size. You would
be amazed how much software in the world is written by people on x86
little endian with the 4Kb page size and they never ever test anywhere
else. I also have sparc64 running Debian sid but it has some real weird
personality issues. Also, the PowerMac quad is a strange name. Really it
is a dual socket machine with dual cores and I think the entire machine
architecture must have been designed by IBM. The memory is proper ECC
memory and thus you can actually trust it. Get one and give it a whirl
and try not to smirk at the power usage. They are very power hungry
machines. Pretty looking but power hungry.

enceladus$
enceladus$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
cpu             : PPC970MP, altivec supported
clock           : 2500.000000MHz
revision        : 1.1 (pvr 0044 0101)

processor       : 1
cpu             : PPC970MP, altivec supported
clock           : 2500.000000MHz
revision        : 1.1 (pvr 0044 0101)

processor       : 2
cpu             : PPC970MP, altivec supported
clock           : 2500.000000MHz
revision        : 1.1 (pvr 0044 0101)

processor       : 3
cpu             : PPC970MP, altivec supported
clock           : 2500.000000MHz
revision        : 1.1 (pvr 0044 0101)

timebase        : 33333333
platform        : PowerMac
model           : PowerMac11,2
machine         : PowerMac11,2
motherboard     : PowerMac11,2 MacRISC4 Power Macintosh
detected as     : 337 (PowerMac G5 Dual Core)
pmac flags      : 00000000
L2 cache        : 1024K unified
pmac-generation : NewWorld
enceladus$
enceladus$ head /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:        8168256 kB
MemFree:         7429632 kB
MemAvailable:    7873856 kB
Buffers:           40896 kB
Cached:           428480 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:           102528 kB
Inactive:         429376 kB
Active(anon):       4096 kB
Inactive(anon):    64640 kB
enceladus$
enceladus$ cat /etc/debian_version
bullseye/sid
enceladus$
enceladus$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 5.9.0-genunix (root@enceladus) (gcc (Debian 10.2.0-13)
10.2.0, GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Debian) 2.35.1) #1 SMP Wed Oct 14
06:17:00 GMT 2020
enceladus$

I build my own kernel on that thing all the time. It rips through the
whole build process with 2800+ modules in about 90 minutes.

enceladus$ find /lib/modules/`uname -r`/ -type f | wc -l
2866

However it draws 300 watts at power up and settles down to 200 watts
just doing nothing much.

-- 
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
GreyBeard and suspenders optional