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PowerPC/POWER Special Interest Group

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Fedora 18

Fedora 18 for Power is currently in development. The schedule is following the one for primary as closely as possible Fedora 18 schedule. As usual we have architecture specific blocker tracking bugs open for Alpha, Beta and RC:

Fedora 18 PowerPC Alpha blocker tracker

Fedora 18 PowerPC Beta blocker tracker

Fedora 18 PowerPC RC blocker tracker

The current nightly composes can be found here: F18 latest compose

Fedora 18 Alpha Checklists

Fedora 18 Alpha Checklist

Fedora 18 Alpha Release notes

Fedora 18 Alpha PowerPC release notes

Fedora 18 Alpha mirrors

Fedora 18 Alpha PowerPC mirrorlist

Fedora 17

Fedora 17 for Power was announced on June 14th, 2012. Please see the release notes for additional details or download it from your closest mirror. It has been most extensively tested on IBM Power systems, but is also known to work on Apple Mac G5 systems.

Fedora 16

Fedora 16 for PPC64 was released Dec. 23th, 2011. It is available on several mirrors which are listed here.

It is known to work on the new Power7 machines and on PowerMac G5 with > 1Gb RAM. Installations on machines with less RAM might work, but that is untested yet (feedback welcome).


A fresh installation for F16 if you're currently using a pre-release is highly recommended so that you can verify that all reported and closed as fixed bugs have really been addressed in the final F16 release.


If the installation fails, here is a HOWTO for an install that requires you to have a system with an older RHEL or Fedora installation and that doesn't use the usual anaconda installer.


On the mirrors are also install media and packages for PPC (32bit) Those are completely untested and any bugreports without patches attached that fix the issue will most likely be deferred atm as we're concentrating on 64bit as that's the only hardware that the developers currently have. We have to rely on the community to provide fixes for 32bit problems.

If you want to help out with testing, please report any problems on IRC or in bugzilla (make sure to set the architecture to 'powerpc'). Feedback about installations on older hardware such as 32bit PowerMac G4 is appreciated, but as we're focusing on 64bit machines it might take some time to fix 32bit issues unless patches are attached to the bugreports.


Previous Fedora for Power releases

The last Fedora release for PPC before F16 was Fedora 12 and can be found at http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/ppc/iso/



Fedora rebuild efforts

There are currently efforts ongoing to recompile all packages and prepare a F-17 release.

This is the current status of the package rebuild:


Rebuild problems, TODO list

- Eclipse and all the packages that depend on it aren't available yet. Work is in progress to bring Eclipse on the PowerPC platform.

- yaboot is only available on 32bit PPC which means we currently need some hacks for 64bit boot images. This won't change as the PPC firmware seems to be 32bit only. In the long term yaboot is supposed to be replaced by grub2, at the moment it is still required to boot from DVD.

- The Power7 optimized glibc package (glibc.ppc64p7) is currently broken and will render the system unusable as soon as it it installed.

The PowerPC koji build system

All official Fedora PowerPC packages will be built by the koji build system at the PowerPC koji hub

All non-scratch packages that haven't been deleted by the garbage-collector are available at the package storage, scratch builds can be found for a few days at the scratch repository

Building packages on the PowerPC koji build system

Everyone with a Fedora account can do at least scratch builds of packages on the PowerPC koji build system, package maintainers who can check changes into the git repositories can build updated packages that will later on end up in the distribution.

Doing scratch builds

After running fedora-packager-setup from the fedora-packager rpm

ppc-koji build --scratch f17 yourpkg.src.rpm

These builds will be removed from koji automatically after a while.

'real' builds

'Real' builds will be pulled into the package repositories and into the install images, unless they got replaced by later versions. After running fedora-packager-setup from the fedora-packager rpm

ppc-koji build f17 "$(fedpkg giturl)"

or

fedpkg build --target=f17
(this works only when you have a symlink from ~/.koji/ppc-config to ~/.koji/config)

(currently broken: bugzilla 787776 )

PPC Shell access for debugging

David Woodhouse (dwmw2), Josh Boyer (jwb) or Karsten Hopp (Kick_) may provide you access to a PPC box for build debugging purposes. Just send them an e-mail with an request and a public SSH key.

Documentation

Work needed

Bugzilla

Known build issues

ppc64p7 subarch

Links