Eclipse upstream dropping ppc64 and the consequence
by Dan Horák
Hi everyone,
the Eclipse upstream is dropping ppc64 (big endian) support [1] in the
next version planned to be released in September after they dropped
ppc32 in the previous release. Eclipse is part of the minimal
self-hosted buildroot in Fedora, in the Java ecosystem. The whole
minimal buildroot consists of 3200+ source rpms, so it's pretty complex.
Removing the dependency on eclipse would require a substantial amount of
work, with an uncertain result. Because both the Power part of the
Alternative Arches team and the Fedora Eclipse team lack the resources
for committing to this work, we came to the conclusion that the time to
drop ppc64 from Fedora is now, before the Fedora 29 release. And it's
not only Eclipse, who is focusing to ppc64le Linux on Power hardware,
some projects already did that, like Golang, but here we had the
infrastructure to omit it for some architecture. And more will come
for sure. So the next step is to open a system-wide change for F-29,
where we will make it official.
The Power/PowerPC hardware played always a role in the architecture
support, but for some time it has already been possible to obtain
non-server HW, that's capable of running little-endian Linux on Power.
[1]
https://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/cross-project-issues-dev/msg15640.html
With regards,
Dan on behalf of the Alt-Arch team
5 years, 3 months