[CentOS] Re: Hot swap CPU

Sun Jul 3 13:07:55 UTC 2005
Pasi Pirhonen <upi at iki.fi>

Hi,


On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 07:25:40AM -0400, Chris Mauritz wrote:
> Johnny Hughes wrote:
> 
> >
> >Believe it or not ... there is a plan for a future SPARC distro for
> >CentOS.  It is only in the planning stages now :)
> >
> >There is already an beta 4.1 release for the ALPHA processor.
> > 
> >
> 
> Why?  Are there THAT many of these boxes laying around to overcome the 
> PITA factor of generating a new release?
> 

If i say few words about this, while i am the guy who pushed the
CentOS-4.1/alpha out to public.

Making 1:1 (more or like) distros from source base doesn't get one
excited quite long. Actually it's not that challenging at all. One must
find something more challenging to work with and these 'out of
mainstream releases' are by product of that. So it's just hobby
challeging the dev team IMO more like 'the world really, really, really
needs this'

If you look the torrent tracker stats, there would be only ia32
release, if it would only judged by the downloads/arch. Maybe x86-64
too, but rest are really something minority on quantity. 


I'd actually have the 32bit part of the sparc64 already build and
fixed. No anaconda, no kernel etc. and the 64bit needed parts were
stuck on producing 64bit xorg build for gcc proper build last time i
worked with that. For my side, it's pretty much freezed ATM, but no
promises to any direction.


> Just curious.  S390 CentOS coming soon too?  :-P
> 

Actually it is. I'd say s390 is less than week as it's now on final
build round on real iron. s390x is soemthing built under hercules and
there are some floating point problems (more like features than BUGs)
which prevest some package test to get right results. I am not so
confident on that side as i do have to just blindly trust gcc soinf it
job right while the pre-defined test on package advices that the
package was not built right. It's just few packages and we have
talked/tested this with the hercules developers, so i am quite
confident the s390x being allright even tho it's saying other.

The problems there is that the accuracy of FP-units are different. The
floating point is calcultaed natively on hosts FP-unit and the rounding
after some 6-8 digits aren't alwways what youd' expect (or something. I
am not good on this). Emulating the floating point isn't much option
either as it would be maybe two magnitudes penalty and the emulation is
emulation already :)

For s390 i was fortunate anought to get real iron LPAR for building
like week ago.


-- 
Pasi Pirhonen - upi at iki.fi - http://iki.fi/upi/