[Debian-ppc64-devel] is this port alife?

[Sven Luther]

On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 10:02:12AM +0100, Andreas Schuldei wrote:
> 
> i try to secure power5 machines (both for this port and for usage

Hi, please make sure you don't repeat the augsbourg machine mess and include
the debian/powerpc guys into your discussions. You are aware than for IBM the
three augsbourg machines Bastian is playing with have been donated to debian,
while nobody in debian had any hint about this, and it came out after
investigation that there where some problems in how Martin handled this with
the IBM guys. I think the main mistake was that he was pushing for hardware
donation, while the IBM guys wanted to do the support in-house or something,
while i now feel that the right way would have been to encourage some internal
IBM/linux guy to become a DD and/or join the various debian teams working on
that. Oh well, as they say, hindsight is easy :)

Also, who do you speak to at IBM or elsewhere ? 

Also; when i asked the debian-admin team what would be needed to bring one of
the augsbourg machines in the official debian hardware network, so they could
be used as developer machine or even as buildd, my offer was rejected with a
"we have enough powerpc machiens", and myself i feel unconfortable using those
machines for anything official if their admining is not controlled by debian.

They even have this nice logical partitioning thingy, and can thus have
various virutal machines inside each one, available only to a subset of people
or usage in a secure way.

> by the project as a whole) and now hear from Bastian Blank
> (waldi) that there might be no need for such a port since the
> benefits are not overwhelming.

Well, it depends, we now have a biarch toolchain in etch, as well as a 64bit
built kernel, which gives you full 32bit support for those machines. The only
thing missing is the rebuild of libraries and choice apps in 64bit mode, but
the release team couldn't give me a definite answer if we should go biarch or
multiarch, they favour multi-arch, but i have no evidence of anyone working on
this, and nobody seems to have any interest in this stuff. And for myself my
interest is not so high, as i don't really have 64bit hardware, not even some
refurbished power3 box.

64bit binaries on powerpc64 are a performance hit, contrary to the amd64 case,
where the cost of doing 64bit is offset by the fact that the original 32bit
x86 instruction set is so sucky, and thus running a biarch or multiarch setup
is preferable to the pure-64 way, which also implies a bigger hit on the
archvie infrastructure if we are going to support it (since binaries are
bigger and everything needs to be rebuilt). Also, given the abysmal handling
of the amd64 issue with regard our ftp-archive, i have some doubt of seeing a
new pure64 port ever making it into the official archive, or even the
possibility to go the multi-arch way, so if i hear no news from this by
january, i am going to single-handledy work the biarch way; so we have at
leastr something for etch, even if in the long run multi-arch makes more
sense.

Also, notice that Genesi has announced at the China Power.org event that it
will build a ppc970 motherboard, featuring dual 970MP (for a total of 4
cores), i can give no release date or anything of the sort though.

Finally, the said 'ppc64' port on alioth is the single-effort of Andreas
Jochens, who resisted any attempt to work with the rest of the debian/powerpc
folk on multiarch or biarch, and in no way any kind of official powerpc 64bit
port effort well integrated into debian.

Friendly,

Sven Luther