in theory it should be easier to port applications to ppc64el, especially software that is not maintained by Debian (like various commercial or not packaged apps and libraries), because it makes a little bit more similar to x86 and amd64. Power8 hardware isn't terribly expensive (and there are already non-IBM manufacture cpu / cores available from China AFAIK, which might bring power and power9 prices down), and going forward ppc64el is probably easier to maintain longterm.
I would personally prefere big endian too over little endian, but that is reality, and not that important compared to other ppc64 benefits. 2016-06-20 17:26 GMT+02:00 <alexmcwhir...@triadic.us>: > On 2016-06-20 10:29, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > >> On 06/20/2016 04:15 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote: >> >>> On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 04:11:32PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz >>> wrote: >>> >>>> Well, we just did a full archive rebuild of "ppc64" to be able to >>>> support ppc64 on the e5500 cores by disabling AltiVec, didn't we? >>>> >>> >>> Well it is getting there. >>> >> >> The archive rebuild is done and around 11200 packages are up-to-date. It's >> just the installer that needs work and someone needs to convince the >> release >> team that ppc64 is something we want as a release architecture. >> >> Adrian >> > > Just out of curiosity, what's the stipulation with ppc64? Access to > hardware shouldn't be a problem if ppc64el is a release arch. Maybe i'm > just weird, but i would pick ppc64 over ppc64el any day. Other than my > personal affinity for big endian cpu's, ppc64el only has support for one > generation of cpu's whereas ppc64 should be able to run on everything from > power4 / ppc970 and up without too much trouble. > >
