On Mon, 9 Mar 2015 11:49:56 +0000
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.
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.
kevin