On Thursday, May 19, 2016 6:36:30 PM CDT Jose E. Marchesi wrote:
> Given how long it has been since there was a Fedora SPARC port I > think the > best bet at this point will be bootstrapping the arch. We have > scripts > available for doing so from the bringups of armv7hl, aarch64 and > ppc64le. I > would strongly suggest that 32 bit support is dropped on the floor > and only > sparc64 is done. we have removed 32 bit from s390, ppc and not > done it for > aarch64. I am looking at ways to remove it for x86 arches. > > What we did in LFS was to bootstrap in 64-bit only and then later we > added multilib support in GCC and a glibc.sparcv9 so people could > build > and run 32-bit programs. We changed the .spec files and other scripts > (including yum) so sparcv9 (the 32bit one) is a subarch of sparc64. > > In SPARC it is important to keep 32-bit capabilities, as a big amount > of > programs out there have not been ported to 64-bit. By "big ammount of programs" I presume you mean proprietary as opposed to open source programs that can generally just be recompiled with minor changes (I've done a number of bootstraps), if it's the later I suggest spending time fixing those.
Oh, we did, and we do, trust me :) For years we have been busy in Oracle bringing a RH derivative up to sparc64, and that involved patching hundred of packages. I am talking about big programs that are not trivial to upgrade, like compilers with native code generators, garbage collectors, libraries with large amounts of assembly code, etc. And yes, also third-party programs that for whatever reasons are not ported.
And btw it is not in my interest to bring any proprietary software to Fedora. On the contrary, I refuse to touch proprietary software, even in my paid job, with no exceptions.
We're actively moving to deprecate multilib from Fedora so that basically means that any new boot straps should not be using it. Basically you're going to have to do a LOT of convincing me that it's needed! I'm not convinced.
I see. Well, we will think about it.
the way koji works everything has to be built for sparc64 and if you do sparcv9 it has to be built for it also. before shutting down the previous sparc koji we had everything built for both sparc64 and sparcv9, it was a lot of work and effort more so in the 32 bit side. There was also major issues with booting.There kernel and initramfs had to be under 10Mb compined. at least on the hardware I had, unless we gained a bootloader that was able to take over and do pxe installs and be loaded. ppc64 used to work the same as sparc and they decided it was in their interests and created less confusion to just go pure 64 bit
perhaps we should set up a meeting to go over how everything works, and help everyone understand both sides?
Dennis
rel-eng@lists.fedoraproject.org