SPARC Status (Was Re: Secondary Architecture Status?)

Peter Robinson pbrobinson at gmail.com
Tue May 12 14:06:22 UTC 2009


>> > I would really like to see a proliferation of secondary arches in
>> > Fedora, but I don't think 'workstation' is a viable usage model for
>> > them to get started.  Most will have to focus on the type of hardware
>> > that actually sells for that arch, and yes I realize that can be at
>> > odds with some of the directions Fedora is going.
>>
>> I think there are most likely two candidates for a secondary arch
>> other than PPC. The first is sparc where from the server point of view
>> where its probably about as prolific as PPC in that regard. The second
>> would be arm but that is more from the NetBook/MID/Phone/STB
>> perspective where there are quite a few devices in the 500Mhz-1Ghz
>> range with 256-512Mb RAM. With the OLPC X0-1 we've proven that Fedora
>> can run relatively well on that sort of spec, they also tend to be
>> relatively cheap.
>
> Once we switch our 32-bit x86 packages from i586 to i686 for F12
> (hopefully w/sse2 enabled as well), then i586 becomes a very doable
> secondary arch as well, if enough people are interested in keeping
> their clunkers running the latest-n-greatest stuff...

What about the million odd (not sure of the actual deployment numbers)
OLPC XO clunkers out there that fall into this category? I though the
whole difference between i586 and i686 was cmov and that wasn't
considered a great performance boost.

Peter




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