[Debian-ppc64-devel] Call For Help - Please support the ppc64 architecture

[Sven Luther]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2005 at 09:46:36AM +1100, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-03-16 at 20:27 +0100, Andreas Jochens wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > This is a call for help from the 'ppc64' porters. 
> > 
> > On 05-Mar-14 16:14, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> > > Also, as with the amd64 port, there is disagreement about the name.
> > > While ppc64 would be nicer and in line with the LSB, our current
> > > PowerPC port is called powerpc and therefore it would make more sense
> > > to call the 64 bit port powerpc64.
> > 
> > There has been a decision of the Debian Technical Committee concerning 
> > the name of the amd64 port which basically says that the porting team 
> > should decide on the architecture name generally (see [1]).
> > 
> > The ppc64 porters decided to use the name 'ppc64' as the package 
> > name a few month ago. 
> >
> > .../...
> 
> It's a fully 64 bits setup as it seems ? That is rather inefficient.
> 
> Have we any proper way of doing multiarch setups ? The "proper" way to
> do ppc64 is to have both archs libs and 32 bits userland for most
> things, as ppc64 native code is slightly slower.
> 
> I have repeated that over and over again but it seems I have been
> ignored so far...

Not ignored, there is an effort, fully orthogonal to this pure-64 one, to get
ppc64 biarch going. We are somewhat stopped by the work needed on the sarge
release, but it will happen in the close next time.

Now, there is an interest on IBM's and IBM's customer part for getting ppc64
support, and altough we have access to the augsbourg power5 box (but without
virtual machine, so we can't really do kernel or installer tests), we don't
have those ppc64 machine IBM mentioned could be made available, which makes
work on the kernel and installer part at least less possible.

Friendly,

Sven Luther