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

[Sven Luther]

On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 12:52:26PM +0100, Andreas Jochens wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On 05-Mar-08 10:14, Sven Luther wrote:
> >   1) the 32bit kernel and userland should work perfectly on your imac.
> 
> I can confirm this. 32-bit Debian works fine on my Apple G5.
> Thank you for your work on this.
> 
> >   3) for individual applications which need 64bit userland (mostly databases
> >   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.
> 
> There seems to be a misunderstanding here. The large distributions 
> including RedHat/Fedora, Suse/Novell and Gentoo all have separate 64-bit 
> ppc64 ports, i.e. ports which have almost everything compiled in 64-bit 
> mode. The only packages which are compiled as 32-bit in those ports are
> the boot loader (yaboot) and OpenOffice which is not yet 64-bit clean.

No, i believe you are wrong, or partially so at least. I mean, it may have
changed in the last few month, but last this was discussed, both redhat and
suse where taking the biarch approach, while gentoo goes the pure-64bit
approach.

> The Debian ppc64 port on alioth is quite similar to the ppc64 ports of
> the other major distributions. One minor difference between RedHat/Suse 
> on one side and Debian/Gentoo on the other is that RedHat and Suse 
> put native 64-bit libraries in '/lib64' and 32-bit libraries in '/lib', 
> while Debian and Gentoo put native 64-bit libraries in '/lib' and
> 32-bit libraries in '/lib32'.

Exactly what i was saying, the only difference is the extent of the 64bit
rebuilds. 

But then, again the IBM ppc64 folk tell me that there is a slight performance
hit in running 64bit userland if it is not necessary, and i wonder what you
reply to this ? 

Friendly,

Sven Luther