[CentOS-devel] CentOS-7 on PowerPC

Thu Jun 12 05:23:02 UTC 2014
Fabian Arrotin <fabian.arrotin at arrfab.net>

On 12/06/14 01:27, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'd like to try and see if we can get a secondary arch sort of effort
> underway to build and deliver a PowerPC ( power7 ? ) distro based on the
> CentOS-7.

Yeah, that's something we discussed already several times, and some
people even noticed the #centos-ppc channel on Freenode .. :-)

> 
> Power hardware is hard to come by, and we're going to mostly bootstrap
> from the powerpc community resources hosted at OSUOSL - but we do have
> enough resources to get the buildsystem up and keep it running for the
> ppc64 and ppc tree's. To complement this, we also have a power7 machine
> for the time being, on loan from a sponsor. But its future is uncertain,
> we might only have it for another 6 months. The resouces at OSL should,
> however, persist.

So the goal would be to have a "secondary arch" support, but even that
can be divided into two things : ppc64 and ppc.
ppc64 is the default target (for quite some time) upstream, but I expect
the ppc part being the most difficult one to rebuild (with all the
different patches and optimization even for Power6+ - depending on the
release -)

> 
> Also, as most people on this list will realise - there is quite a lot of
> momentum inside the project, so the existing contributors dont have
> enough time to contribute towards another arch as well, so the effort to
> run this will need to come from the community.

That's true, so "let's surf on the wave" ....

> 
> So the purpose of my email is two fold, (1) is there enough community
> interest to undertake this effort ? and (2) are there enough community
> folks willing to put in the time to make it happen. Ideally some of you
> lot will have local hardware to test and qa the builds as well.
> 
> Regards,
> 


-- 
Fabian Arrotin
gpg key: 56BEC54E | twitter: @arrfab