Re: [Stretch] Status for architecture qualification

2016-06-20 Thread alexmcwhirter

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.




Re: [Stretch] Status for architecture qualification

2016-06-14 Thread alexmcwhirter

On 2016-06-14 03:06, Philipp Kern wrote:

On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 07:33:56PM +, Niels Thykier wrote:

Philipp Kern:
> On 2016-06-05 12:01, Niels Thykier wrote:
>>  * amd64, i386, armel, armhf, arm64, mips, mipsel, powerpc, ppc64el,
>>s390x
>>- *No* blockers at this time from RT, DSA nor security.
>>- s390, ppc64el and all arm ports have DSA concerns.
> What is the current DSA concern about s390x?
The concern listed as: "rely on sponsors for hardware (mild concern)"

As I recall the argument went something along the lines of:

"Debian cannot replace the hardware; if any of the machines dies, we
need a sponsor to replace it.  If all of them dies and we cannot get
sponsored replacements, we cannot support the architecture any longer"

(My wording)


Yeah, but that's unfortunately one of the universal truths of this 
port.

I mean in theory sometimes they turn up on eBay and people try to make
them work[1].

It also seems true for other ports where we commonly relied on sponsors
to hand us replacements. But maybe it's only ppc64el these days, maybe
there are useful builds available for the others (including arm64 and
mips) on the market now.

Kind regards and thanks
Philipp Kern

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk
(Here's What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe)


Fun story, i had a client who was considering getting their hands on a 
Z9, they asked me a few others to go with them to see IBM present a demo 
of it. Long story short the IBM guys started a job and literally started 
pulling CPU and Mem boards out of the machine mid job. The error log on 
the OS/2 maintenance laptop was going crazy, but the OS kept running the 
job.


In other words, i don't think a s390x box will ever just die. Really 
interesting machines to say the least, hopefully one day i will get to 
play with one. The other issues with s390x is that  in most cases you 
don't buy them. You essentially lease the CPU usage and IBM charges you 
based on how much CPU usage you've consumed over a given time. It makes 
me wonder how they ever get on eBay. IBM typically takes them back after 
you stop paying for it.