Re: AMD 64 support

["Mike A. Harris" <mharris redhat com>]

On Wed, 5 Nov 2003, Peter Jones wrote:

>> Red Hat has never to my knowledge produced the operating system for
>> non-x86 processors except under contract with a vendor who produces
>> systems for the given processor. 
>
>This is just plain wrong; we did Alpha and SPARC both for quite some time 
>without being paid to do them.

It's not wrong in the specific wording that I used, in particular 
the "to my knowledge" part.

I started at Red Hat just after Red Hat Linux 7.0 was released, 
and every architecture port we've done the entire time that I've 
been here was contractual, unless I have missed something.  Prior 
to that I have no knowledge of what ports were funded or not, 
however Sparc was dropped due to lack of commercial interest if 
that means anything, and so was Alpha after 7.2.

I put "to my knowledge" intentionally, so as not to exclude the 
possibility that there was something done outside of my 
knowledge prior to my assimilation into The Hat.  ;o)


>> While x86 is the mainstay, non-x86 processors have traditionally just
>> not been a viable profitable platform to develop the OS for without
>> partnerships and contracts to do the work in order to make it
>> worthwhile.
>
>That's probably pretty accurate.

Until now...  Lets change all that.  ;o)


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat