On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 3:40 PM, taii...@gmx.com wrote:
> I am of curious as to peoples experiences with OpenPOWER machines and gentoo
> - is it as simple as using the ppc64 arch iso instead of x86_64?
> If anyone uses it for a workstation, what apps do you have? is there
> anything normal missing? (ie: that one would have on an x86_64 workstation)
>
I haven't been able to use Gentoo directly, but I have used Linux on
Power on GCC's servers. There's nothing terribly abnormal, though
there's a lot of interesting FPU modes.
> I noticed that gentoo only has big endian isos instead of little endian and
> I am also wondering what this means for software availability as I have
> never heard of endianness before a few months ago.
>
You should use ppc64le. This complicates things when compiling, and is
a minor issue for some other compilers, who do not support multilib in
a way that makes it possible to build a ppc64le toolchain from a ppc64
toolchain. You may need to set up tools on a computer of another
architecture, or get prebuilt tools from GCC.
> Info:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER9 (POWER is now the only high performance
> arch that is owner controlled now that AMD has its ME analog PSP)
> http://raptorcs.com/ (The T2 is a modified "romulus" reference board made
> available to the general public with libre firmware)
>
They are expensive, but one day, if the Lord decides to bless me, I may own one.
Cheers,
R0b0t1
