Fedora PPC status & work in progress :)

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Dan Horák <dan at danny.cz> wrote:
>> > Discussions are still ongoing on how to solve the unified initrd size
>> > problem though as currently for Power6 or Power5 the new initrd is just
>> > too large to ever work, even if it would be better compressed. So we
>> > might have to go back to a 2 stage install process for PowerPC at least,
>> > but very likely with a dracut based 1st stage then.
>>
>> As noted on IRC, the DVD doesn't support ppc32 machines.  Are those
>> being dropped, or is it simply a temporary omission?
>>
>> On a similar note, it seems the preference for packages is now ppc64
>> whereas in prior Fedora releases ppc was the perferred arch, even on
>> 64-bit machines.  RHEL 6 (and SLES 11) have made that changed, but it
>> was rejected by FESCo prior to PowerPC being dropped as a primary
>> architecture.  Has the preference changed to 64-bit permanently?
>
> we can decide it ourselves now, so I'd go with 2 branches - ppc (32-bit)
> to satisfy people with eg. Mac G4 hardware and ppc64 (with 64-bit as
> preferred and 32-bit as compat, it's a known fact that Fedora serves as
> RHEL upstream) for G5s and IBM servers/workstations.

I think it would be beneficial to spend a bit of time documenting the
supported hardware and composition going forward.  I have no personal
preference on the bit-size issue, but it wasn't communicated on the
list prior to my asking.

Additional items to cover are:

1) Are ppc32 machines supported?  Specifically I'm thinking of Apple
G4 machines, but we used to build a bunch of Freescale device drivers
and such as well for machines in the 6xx class.

2) Which machine type are supported?  Seems POWER7, possibly POWER6
and 5.  I would imagine we would want to explicitly drop PS3 support
given it's limited memory (vs initrd) and the fact that it's not
really sustainable as a machine due to firmware changes.  However, do
we support Apple G5 and Powerstation machines?  (I think yes, but it's
unclear).

3) Which arch is the primary on 64-bit (seems ppc64)

josh