Peter Robinson <pbrobinson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
...snip...
> > 1) Who is championing an architecture?
>
> Primarily IBM, but this will widen with the OpenPOWER foundation and
> it's members widening and HW from that initiative starting to become
> available. In the case of aarch64, if that happens, there will be
> similarities through Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG).
Would we then have a tracker bug and a way for maintainers to call on
these resources when/if their packages don't build?
> > 2) Where do developers get access to hardware that they can debug
> > issues if they want to.
>
> I'll let Mike (from IBM) answer this one in detail but there's a
> number of Universities hosting publicly accessible instances of HW
> with a process in place, Linaro has similar process with access to
> aarch64 HW running Fedora releases.
This would be good to know.
> > 3) How do we remove an architecture for whatever reasons? [Possible
> > ones could be it turns out that CentOS i686 is dropped after one
> > subrelease... or PPC64be is dropped by IBM because everyone moved
> > to PPC64le. Or Itanium3 comes out and no one wants x86_64.]
>
> I don't see that would be any different to how we dropped PPC from
> mainline Fedora back in the F-12/13 timeframe but the architectures,
> once added to core RHEL, will be supported for the lifecycle of RHEL
> so I don't see that this process would be any different to how we
> dropped i686 or any of the 32 bit architectures in the transition from
> el6 -> el7. I personally don't think it's actually worth expending too
> much time on this process until the issue arises, cross the bridge
> when we get there so to speak.
I'm assuming we would keep ppc64 around too for now on the rhel's we
support?
...snip...
> I don't see those issues any different to any of the other
> architectures or hardware that's needed to run Fedora infrastructure
> whether it be servers, storage or network. We have Enterprise support
> on the HW with all due process.
Well, we don't have any ppc-le builders currently for EPEL.
I guess this would need to be figured out off list first?
We do have secondary arch Fedora ones, but the EPEL builders are in the
primary koji, so they would need to be their own thing and have
support, etc. I dont think we want to share builders with Fedora
secondary ppc...
We can figure this out off list tho.
Some of the new P8 hardware that was recently racked is intended to be
for EPEL on ppc64/ppc64le, I just need to get it configured and build
VMs done etc
> From an infrastructure PoV the advantage that Power8 hardware has
is
> that it's much closer to x86 in a number of ways and it'll enable us
> to mimic the deployment of things like virt builders in a single
> contiguous manner across all architectures to enable more simplified
> standardised manner to ease burden and increase automation from an
> infra PoV
Thats good.