Architectures/PowerPC

PowerPC/POWER/Cell Special Interest Group

• IRC: #fedora-ppc on irc.freenode.net
• Mailing List: fedora-ppc mailing list

Members

• Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
  
• Paul Nasrat
  
• Peter Lemenkov
  
• Stefan Posdzich (using a Playstation 3 with Fedora 9)
  
• Walter Justen
• Adrian Reber
• Karsten Hopp (PowerMac G5)
• Jiri Skala
• Dan Horák (IBM IntelliStation 275)

Latest PPC Fedora release

Latest Fedora release for PPC is currently Fedora 12 and can be found from http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/ppc/iso/

We're doing composes of the F-16 packages and create bootable DVD isos. Repositories with the latest packages can be found on our koji hub, the DVD images are currently available in a temporary location. Don't expect to be able to install with these DVD isos yet or with the bootimages from the mash directories, it might or it might not work on your machine due to the new combined initrd which is to large for some PowerPC firmwares. The images are known to work on the new Power7 machines and on a PowerMac G5 with 8Gb RAM. There's a workaround for that, but it requires to have a system with an older RHEL or Fedora installation.

UPDATE The ISOs from 20110809 and newer have been built with a branch called treebuilder of our lorax tool. We're now back to a small initrd and a second stage ramdisk. Will Woods treebuilder page contains more information about his enhancements, but make sure to read the discussion of known issues and workarounds, too.

UPDATE Latest ISO from 20110920 is installable from previously installed system using network installation source. Some workarounds are needed to finish it:

1. Create one spare partition to hold the LiveOS folder from the ISO, create ext4 filesystem on it, mount it,
2. copy LiveOS folder to this partition,
3. put the vmlinuz and initrd.img from ppc/ppc64 folder to /boot,
4. edit /boot/etc/yaboot.conf, add following lines, replace DEVICE with the partition holding the LiveOS folder:

image=/vmlinuz
	label=Fedora
	initrd=/initrd.img
	read-only
	append="root=live:/dev/DEVICE vnc serial"

1. Reboot the system and watch the console,
2. after unsuccessful network configuration hit ^Z,
3. run dhclient,
4. get the PID of NetworkManager using ps aux, terminate it,
5. hit ^D to continue with the installation,
6. connect to vnc, proceed to partitioning,
7. choose custom layout, do not remove the partition with LiveOS folder,
8. input the path to installation repository,
9. finish the installation.

After these steps it should boot to newly installed system. I didn't use LVM for the installation and installed only minimal package set.

If you want to help out with testing, please report any problems on IRC or in bugzilla (make sure to set the architecture to 'powerpc'). Feedback about installations on older hardware such as 32bit PowerMac G4 is appreciated, but as we're focusing on 64bit machines it might take some time to fix 32bit issues unless patches are attached to the bugreports.

Fedora rebuild efforts

There are currently efforts ongoing to recompile all packages and prepare a F-16 release.

This is the current status of the package rebuild:

Rebuild problems, TODO list

- The most urgent problem at the moment is to get the latest version installable (maybe even with some workarounds for problems) so that the installer and bootloader teams can pick up the work.

- The Haskell Compiler (ghc) is available on PPC64. Jens Petersen & Jiri Skala work on bumping haskell-platform packages for PPC64. Unfortunately upstream don't support GHCi & NGC for PPC64. Therefore following packages aren't available for PPC64:

• ghc-template-haskel
• ghc-ForSyDe
• ghc-QuickCheck
• ghc-hamlet
• ghc-parameterized-data
• ghc-type-level
• haskell-platform packages.

- yaboot only available on PPC which means we currently need some hacks for 64bit boot images

- segmentation fault of alt-ergo.opt during build bugzilla #704236

The PowerPC koji build system

All official Fedora PowerPC packages will be built by the koji build system at the PowerPC koji hub

All non-scratch packages that haven't been deleted by the garbage-collector are available at the package storage, scratch builds can be found for a few days at the scratch repository

Building packages on the PowerPC koji build system

Everyone with a Fedora account can do at least scratch builds of packages on the PowerPC koji build system, package maintainers who can check changes into the git repositories can build updated packages that will later on end up in the distribution.

Doing scratch builds

After running fedora-packager-setup from the fedora-packager rpm

ppc-koji build --scratch dist-f15 yourpkg.src.rpm

These builds will be removed from koji automatically after a while.

'real' builds

'Real' builds will be pulled into the package repositories and into the install images, unless they got replaced by later versions. After running fedora-packager-setup from the fedora-packager rpm

ppc-koji build dist-f15 "$(fedpkg giturl)"

or

fedpkg build --target=dist-f15
(this works only when you have a symlink from ~/.koji/ppc-config to ~/.koji/config)

PPC Shell access for debugging

David Woodhouse (dwmw2) and Josh Boyer (jwboyer) may provide you access to a PPC box for build debugging purposes. Just send them an e-mail with an request and a public SSH key.

Applications/Libraries of Interest

• Mac-on-Linux - virtualization solution for PowerPC

Work needed

Bugzilla

• List of currently open PowerPC bugs
• ExcludeArch for PowerPC

Documentation

• We need step-by-step tutorials describing HOWTO setup Wi-Fi, Apple Bluetooth Mouse and Keyboard, where to find JRE and so on. See the next links (from Ubuntu, Debian and YellowDog):
  • HOWTO: Apple Wireless Keyboard (Bluetooth)
  • PowerPC FAQ
  • Notes abount snd-aoa kernel module

Links

• Power homepage
  
• fedora-ppc mailing list
  
• Power.org
  
• YellowDogLinux support pages
  
• powerdeveloper.org