> Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at 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
Just out of curiosity how many systems are currently in place to do the
EPEL builds for BE ppc64?
>> 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