Port to ppc64le?

Coffee break
1

Is there a road map for an ibm 64 bit power architecture port?

2

I asked @bero about this a while ago, and I think the hold up is lack of test hardware. Application support may be another hurdle. ARM is just more popular, available, and varied. Even then, some applications will not work due to x86_64 being even more popular.

The other issue compounding the addition of new features like that, is the lack of interest in contributing and the wealth of interest in consuming. I think it’s great that people want to see the programs they use available in the repos, but we have a backlog of things that need to be addressed first.

We have some new people here interested in packaging so I think the backlog will be addressed in time. ppc64le is still not very common, so I would expect something like that to be highly experimental. Unless there are a few people willing to port existing packages in the base system over to it, and provide the builder infrastructure for abf, it will probably be a while.

3

If I take this on, (I now have a ppc64le server) is there a guide to porting a distro that I can follow along with - even if it’s for a different architecture/distro?

thanks!

4

I don’t think there’s any guide, but we have a script that should do the most tricky parts almost automatically.

The idea there is to just run (on an existing OM system of an already supported architecture)

./create-omv-env.sh TARGET

where TARGET is the architecture you’d like to port to in rpm notation, so in your case, you want to run

./create-omv-env.sh ppc64le-linux

With any luck, that will create an initial set of packages with which you can create a chroot or a docker container in which you can compile the rest on the target system.

The script was working last year to create an initial RISC-V environment, but will probably need a few changes to adapt to things that have changed in cooker since.

5

Ohhhh! That should help! Wish I was at my desktop to review the script. I will be in a bit.

Initial thoughts,

  • You’re AWESOME!
  • If the script hangs and I can’t (or grok) troubleshoot it, then I might have to DM you.
  • What version, edition of OM was the script built for? Or is that an unnecessary consideration? I’m just thinking about how to minimize the potential breaks.
  • Assuming success, how far does that script get me?
  • I should use this experience to write up a guide.

Discuss: I had planned to bootstrap from Rocky in a separate partition, chroot an environment, bootstrap from there. Working out bugs. I figured some adjustments would be required for the RPMs, and I hoped that sed would be my hero.

This is a great head start, thanks!

6

We really don’t recommend using AI tools to solve problems in OMLx.

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