SPARC Status (Was Re: Secondary Architecture Status?)

Tom "spot" Callaway tcallawa at redhat.com
Mon May 11 17:40:01 UTC 2009


On 05/09/2009 07:20 PM, David Woodhouse wrote:
> We still don't have any secondary architectures gearing up to ship
> Fedora 11 -- it would be really interesting to know why that is.
> 
> What technical barriers are still there -- why don't we have a release
> yet?

For SPARC, there are a few barriers:

* Amount of code writing contributors is very small. Realistically, it
is me and Dennis Gilmore. This significantly slows down efforts in areas
where we need to do more than perform basic package triage, e.g.
anaconda. We have 99% of a Fedora 8 Tree done, but there are still
enough painful bugs and missing features in anaconda that prevent us
from doing a release.
* Automated builds are not yet happening, although, when Dennis gets
back from vacation, I'm going to work with him to setup koji-shadow to
run on an aggressive cron job. I'd still like to see someone solve this
problem correctly with a message bus, but as I have neither the skillset
nor the time to do this, it will likely never happen. Which leads us to
the next barrier:
* The few SPARC contributors have very little time to allocate to the
SPARC effort. Neither of us are paid to do full-time SPARC, and I've got
my fingers in so many pies, I might as well be a pie. This isn't a
technical barrier, per se, merely pointing out that being responsible
for an architecture is a LOT of work. Not to mention that Sun is about
to get swallowed up by Oracle, who I doubt will be overly concerned
about Linux/SPARC, so it is even less likely that we will see additional
code help or community involvement from them (as a contrast to IBM on
PPC/S390).

~spot




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