Hi, On Wed, 8 Mar 2017, Konstantinos Margaritis wrote:
> > There are also other non-Mac machines. E.g. I am pretty sure the > > Linkbook doesn't have altivec and there were a couple of other > > similar small netbooks which sadly did not get popular compared to > > ARM. > > I do not disagree on those points, but it's all a matter of resources. > We do not have the resources of testing on all those platforms, and I > personally know of no Linux powerpc developer that works on a non- > altivec system -except for embedded which is a different case. I'm pretty sure A-Eon, who are selling the AmigaOne X5000 based on an e5500 core, funds the work of some Linux people to keep Debian up to date for that system. And that's a pretty juicy multicore desktop machine, with PCIe slots, RadeonHD videocards and everything, yet no Altivec. Based on their earlier activities, I'd guess A-Eon would be willing to support the right person with hardware, if this makes the difference. > In any case, I'm sorry but I still believe that even more so now it's > more important to let go of the older platforms and just increase our > base requirements to enforce Altivec, definitely for powerpc, and > possibly even for ppc64. That way, we might some day, make it back to > release architecture with a smaller set of supported architectures. As > it is, I highly doubt it. I think until some larger company backs it, or there's mass demand, like with other release versions, it won't happen anyway. I agree though, that the target needs to be redefined, other than "keep those old Macs running somehow". But it's still ironic in the light of this discussion that one of, if not the strongest desktop PPC box one can buy these days has no Altivec. And there are much smaller OSes than Linux which somehow still manage to handle this situation. Just my two cents... Charlie
