Re: [Stretch] Status for architecture qualification

[Witold Baryluk <witold.baryluk@gmail.com>]

in theory it should be easier to port applications to ppc64el, especially software that is not maintained by Debian (like various commercial or not packaged apps and libraries), because it makes a little bit more similar to x86 and amd64. Power8 hardware isn't terribly expensive (and there are already non-IBM manufacture cpu / cores available from China AFAIK, which might bring power and power9 prices down), and going forward ppc64el is probably easier to maintain longterm.

I would personally prefere big endian too over little endian, but that is reality, and not that important compared to other ppc64 benefits.

2016-06-20 17:26 GMT+02:00 <alexmcwhirter@triadic.us>:

On 2016-06-20 10:29, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

On 06/20/2016 04:15 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 04:11:32PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

Well, we just did a full archive rebuild of "ppc64" to be able to
support ppc64 on the e5500 cores by disabling AltiVec, didn't we?

Well it is getting there.

The archive rebuild is done and around 11200 packages are up-to-date. It's
just the installer that needs work and someone needs to convince the release
team that ppc64 is something we want as a release architecture.

Adrian

Just out of curiosity, what's the stipulation with ppc64? Access to hardware shouldn't be a problem if ppc64el is a release arch. Maybe i'm just weird, but i would pick ppc64 over ppc64el any day. Other than my personal affinity for big endian cpu's, ppc64el only has support for one generation of cpu's whereas ppc64 should be able to run on everything from power4 / ppc970 and up without too much trouble.