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:
- Create one spare partition to hold the LiveOS folder from the ISO, create ext4 filesystem on it, mount it,
- copy LiveOS folder from the ISO to this partition,
- put the vmlinuz and initrd.img from ppc/ppc64 folder on ISO to /boot,
- 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"
- Reboot the system and watch the console,
- after unsuccessful network configuration hit
^Z, - run
dhclient, - get the PID of NetworkManager using
ps aux, terminate it, - hit
^Dto continue with the installation, - connect to vnc, proceed to partitioning,
- choose custom layout, do not remove the partition with LiveOS folder,
- input the path to installation repository,
- 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
Documentation
PowerPC Hardware
ApplePowerPC
PlayStation
Work needed
Bugzilla
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):