[Debian-ppc64-devel] Status of debian ppc64?

[Sven Luther]

On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 10:25:22PM +0100, Ram=F3n Rey Vicente wrote:
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>=20
> Hi!
>=20
> I=B4m a long time Debian user and recently I=B4ve bought an iMac G5 fro=
m
> Apple. I know the current Linux distros support for powerpc is becoming
> better and better lately and IBM machines (servers and workstations) an=
d
> Apple ones are well supported (more or less). But most of distros are 3=
2
> bits powerpc native systems, and currently the only two distros I know
> are working on 64 bits native systems are Gentoo/PPC64 and Debian-ppc64=
.
>=20
> Gentoo/PPC64 is apparently working well but I dont know what is the
> status of the Debian ppc64 port. What machines are currenty supported?
> What is the status of the ppc64 package archive (number of packages
> ported)? Are currently available Debian ppc64 installation isos?
>=20
> I will very happy to help debian-ppc64 port...

Due to sarge release status, it is not possible at this time to include t=
he
needed infrastructure changes to debian itself. This will change quickly =
once
debian/sarge is released though.

That said :=20

  1) the 32bit kernel and userland should work perfectly on your imac.

  2) contrary to the amd64 case, which is handicapped by the x86 instruct=
ion
  set to start with, the pure-64 ppc64 userland case is not a performance
  gain, but may even represent a slight performance hit over 32bit userla=
nd
  running on a 64bit kernel.

  3) for individual applications which need 64bit userland (mostly databa=
ses
  or other stuff which needs large amounts of ram), the biarch solution, =
as
  used by suse and other ppc64 players except gentoo, is the way to go.

Friendly,

Sven Luther