[CentOS-devel] CentOS 7 on power64 status

[James O'Connor]

Just an email to summarize where we stand with CentOS 7 ppc64le (Little Endian) and ppc64 (Big Endian). We don’t have an official CentOS power64 SIG yet but I am interested in enlisting further community participation and testing when the time is appropriate.

I have working proof of concept builds of c7-ppc64le and c7-ppc64. Both ports were done using Fedora 22 based PowerKVM guests.

The LE port was done cleanly and involved developing a c7 based Linux From Scratch toolchain to get around a thorny issue with glibc-2.20 in Fedora 21 LE but glibc-2.17 in CentOS 7. This issue further prevents the use of Fedora 21 LE rpms because they all require GLIBC_2.18 and c7 provides GLIBC_2.17.

The BE port is much more straightforward as Fedora 19 ppc64/ppc rpms are used to bootstrap the initial CentOS 7 ppc64/ppc rpms.

As of yesterday we have IBM POWER8 systems up and running PowerKVM in the CentOS datacenter. Similar development and test systems are available at http://osuosl.org/ Work is underway to get Fedora ppc64le and ppc64 builders up and running and replicate the proof of concept builds.

Stay tuned to the centos-devel email list or drop by #centos-ppc on irc.freenode.net to say hello.