SPARC Status (Was Re: Secondary Architecture Status?)

Mat Booth fedora at matbooth.co.uk
Tue May 12 07:25:32 UTC 2009


On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 6:40 PM, Tom "spot" Callaway
<tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> 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
>


There isn't a lot of information on the SPARC wiki page. Is there a
currently a way to install Fedora on a SPARC so I can try it out?


-- 
Mat Booth
www.matbooth.co.uk




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