On 03/08/2017 09:45 PM, Karoly Balogh (Charlie/SGR) wrote: > 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.
I actually have two Tabor A1222 boards from them which I set up as buildds for the powerpcspe port. One of the boards is broken and I have been waiting for a replacements for months now. > 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. I'm not sure how serious they are with these efforts given the fact that I still haven't got a replacement for the second board yet :(. > 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". This is pretty much the key issue. It lacks support from the community and a big company. When I talked with IBM people, they said they basically don't care about 32-Bit PowerPC anymore although they are still doing some bug fixing, but things like a golang port for 32-Bit PowerPC won't happen. At least there is a ppc64 (POWER5) port of golang. > 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. This isn't "Linux", it's a single application for which non-Altivec variants don't make much sense anyways. Do these smaller OS even support applications like mplayer, Firefox or GIMP? Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - [email protected] `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - [email protected] `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
