Re: Debian 11 ppc64be
On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 07:17:34AM -0400, Dennis Clarke wrote:
> 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.
I have encountered plenty of software making those wrong assumptions, and
fixed some of it too. I used to work on systems running Debian ppc (32
bit), and we used an IBM power6+ (P520) and later power7 (P710) machine
as a build box (running 32 bit ppc, with 64 bit kernel). I did some
fixing and a lot of testing to get grub working on the IBM power boxes
because I wanted to run software raid1 and yaboot didn't do that, and
grub looked like it should work, but didn't quite. After many patches
and tests we got it to work, and of course now grub is the default on
IBM boxes in Debian.
> 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.
I remember at one of the ottawa linux symposiums, a guy from IBM mentioned
doing a kernel compile on a P595 in a few seconds.
> 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.
Yeah IBM powerpc chips never have been that power efficient, but they
are fast. I have sometimes considered getting a G5 machine, but not sure
my wife would be happy with me adding more old machines to the collection.
--
Len Sorensen
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