Re: FC2 SPARC status.

On Fri, 2004-01-30 at 11:58, Charles Gillet wrote:
> Has there been any dialogue with the Fedora folks to include sparc 
> support, and if so, how much?  Does Fedora's seemingly furious 
> development pace make catching that train difficult for Aurora, 
> especially since our kindly project members all have day jobs?

Fedora (I mean, Red Hat) is all over the map right now. There is no
public infrastructure in place other than "hold on, something is
coming", which is getting old. As far as private infrastructure, there
haven't been SPARC machines in the buildsystem for some time now, and
the people who run the buildsystem aren't overly thrilled about adding
SPARC machines (they'll slow down builds!), but if we put enough big
iron into the system, they'll probably grin and bear it. Of course, this
leaves the problem of where do we get big iron from. Sun certainly isn't
jumping to donate Starfires, or anything for that matter. However, we do
have some medium sized UltraSPARC machines in the Red Hat basement,
thanks to our various acquisitions. I've got one of our employees
looking into gettting these machines up and on the network.

Summary: My ultimate goal is to let Fedora do the hardwork in their
automated buildsystem. Right now, that's not possible.

Of course, we need to have a modern tree just to get it into the
buildsystem. Which is what I've been working on.

So, if Fedora SPARC can be said to exist, then I'm the maintainer. The
Fedora folks don't care one way or another, if I'm willing to do the
work, they'll let it wear the nametag.

Of course, one of the biggest obstacles is that the sparc32 2.6 kernel
is really in a sorry state. The maintainer still needs to fix modules.
(Yes, modules don't load at all.) This is vital unless everyone wants to
netboot giant monolithic kernels, since SILO has size restrictions for
sparc32. Feel free to poke Keith M Wesolowski <[email protected]>
and offer any and all bribery at your disposal to help expedite this
process. :)

But yeah, I'm making progress. All of my outstanding sparc kernel fixes
but one have been committed upstream.

As soon as I have something that people can do alpha testing on, i will
spray it out there. I just don't think we're going to be on the FC2
schedule unless a miracle happens. I'm regularly staying up till 3 AM
for this anyways. The hamster in my Sun Blade 100 only runs so fast, and
due to my lovely ISP, I can't work from the road. (Tadpole claimed they
could loan me a UltraSPARC laptop, but I'll believe that when I see it).

~spot
---
Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa(a)redhat*com> LCA, RHCE 
Red Hat Sales Engineer || Aurora SPARC Linux Project Leader

"The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is
novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present
social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to
be published." -- Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"

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