"Carlos O'Donell" <carlos@redhat.com> wrote on 01/29/2016 09:26:36 AM:

> From: "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos@redhat.com>

> To: Dan Horák <dan@danny.cz>
> Cc: ppc@lists.fedoraproject.org, fweimer@redhat.com, Steve Munroe/
> Rochester/IBM@IBMUS

> Date: 01/29/2016 09:26 AM
> Subject: Re: revisiting the architecture support on Power
>
> On 01/29/2016 09:55 AM, Dan Horák wrote:
> > sorry for the late reply, but Fedora PPC team would like keep the
> > support for Power7 for a while until we will able to replace the
> > remaining older HW with Power8 one. We have already started the required
> > actions, but as you can understand it will take some time. I personally
> > expect we will be able to switch F-25 to pure Power8.
>
> Certainly.
>


I would really like to understand why we have to support P7LE for another release.

Especial as I know that Mike Wolf is working on getting the new P8 hardware for COPR.

> What I will do is a little bit different.
>
> How does the following patch look to you?
>
> diff --git a/glibc.spec b/glibc.spec
> index 8fc1617..5910b14 100644
> --- a/glibc.spec
> +++ b/glibc.spec
> @@ -885,11 +885,21 @@ build nosegneg -mno-tls-direct-seg-refs
>  )
>  %endif
>  
> +#
> +# The Fedora POWER community has requested we continue to support doing
> +# POWER8 builds on POWER7 hardware.
> +# The request is here by Dan Horak:
> +# https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/
> ppc@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/NAF5I5Z7ZZG7E6IHUY5CGP7UY6GF2JQM/
> +#
Steven J. Munroe
Linux on Power Toolchain Architect
IBM Corporation, Linux Technology Center

> +# To make the eventual transition to POWER8 easier we change the -mcpu
> +# flags and the --with-cpu flag to power7 for the POWER8 build. That means
> +# we still only use POWER7 optimized code, but tune for POWER8.
> +#
>  %if %{buildpower8}
>  (
> -  AddOns="$AddOns --with-cpu=power8"
> -  GCC="$GCC -mcpu=power8 -mtune=power8"
> -  GXX="$GXX -mcpu=power8 -mtune=power8"
> +  AddOns="$AddOns --with-cpu=power7"
> +  GCC="$GCC -mcpu=power7 -mtune=power8"
> +  GXX="$GXX -mcpu=power7 -mtune=power8"
>    build power8
>  )
>  %endif
> ---
>
> This does not address the 64-bit LE POWER8 issues as pointed out by Florian.
>

Yes the P7+ is not a supported platform for PowerPC Little Endian. Period!

And the longer we keep is zombie alive the more problems (bugz in GCC and GLIBC) will accumulate.

Steven J. Munroe
Linux on Power Toolchain Architect
IBM Corporation, Linux Technology Center


> Cheers,
> Carlos.
>