[CentOS-devel] CentOS-7 / powerpc BE bring up

Fri Sep 11 20:02:39 UTC 2015
James O'Connor <jpoc at linux.vnet.ibm.com>

> On Sep 11, 2015, at 2:41 PM, Jeffrey Scheel <scheel at us.ibm.com> wrote:
> 
> centos-devel-bounces at centos.org wrote on 09/11/2015 08:10:42 AM:
> > From: Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org> 
> > On 11/09/15 13:11, Jeffrey Scheel wrote:
> > >> does this work for everyone involved here ?
> > > What's the outlook for getting LE VMs so that the this started as well.
> > >  I'm getting lots of
> > > pressure for LE CentOS from customers, partners, and clients.
> > 
> > I believe the LE VM's are already there, or will be there sometime today
> > ( Fabian is working with James for those ).
> > 
> > 
> > > Perhaps we can get folks who have shown interest in having Power on
> > > CentOS to post
> > > their preferred architecture here?
> > 
> > that would be good, although we've had more request for power5 than
> > power8 :)
> The desire to have Power5 support on Centos7 could lead to an interesting discussion. 
> RHEL 7 on Power does not support POWER5.  This means that we could change 
> CentOS to include it, but then that likely means the performance of CentOS7 on 
> POWER8 would suffer compared to RHEL7. 
> 
> I'm the newbie here so will follow the lead of the community on how to solve.  It should be a great 
> discussion, though.  I love the age-old engineering paradox (as I call it): cheap, fast, good, pick 2! 
> -Jeff 
> 

My vote for folks that want different power tunings from RHEL 7 would be to either:

a) Create separate ppc64p[456] rpm arches and toolchains so as to not hobble the p7/p8 tunings in RHEL7 ppc64le/ppc64. This would be similar to Fedora’s ppc64p7 arch that existed for a brief time. If you want to match RHEL7 compatibility, thou shouldn’t mess with the gcc/glibc tunings.  A similar path could be followed for any embedded IBM/Freescale ppc chips.

b) Think hard about a c6 port for ppc64 which would support P6 at least. Doesn’t get you anywhere fast with LE and would be tackled after the c7 ppc64le and ppc64 efforts.