On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 12:49:19PM +0100, Didier Kryn wrote:
> Le 12/03/2018 à 12:34, Luciano Mannucci a écrit :
> > On Sun, 11 Mar 2018 10:07:57 +0100
> > Martin Steigerwald <martin@???> wrote:
> >
> > > I do follow the Linux PPC laptop project¹, and it would probably be wise to
> > > give some money to them. But they also currently use a closed hardware design.
> > >
> > > [1] https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/
> > Are there plans to port Devuan to PPC? It souldn't be too difficult:
> > there is a Debian and an Ubuntu for PPC...
> >
>     Unfortunately the situation of Debian for Powerpc isn't very clear.
> There is a split between 32-bit, 64-bit, little-endian and big-endian, plus
> the powerpcspe architecture from Freescale, and I think most of these
> arches, if not all, are not longer official Debian arches, but have only the
> status of "ports". AFAIK, IBM only supports Linux for the most recent 64 bit
> arch.

To be exact:
* powerpc is the original 32-bit port; BE; it _was_ an official release arch
but as of stretch has been relegated to second-class status
* powerpcspe is an incompatible arch, 32-bit BE, second-class only
* ppc64 is 64-bit BE, it at a time looked like it's going to become a
release arch but has never made it; it supports quite old CPUs
* ppc64el is 64-bit _LE_, requires POWER8 (there are some LE POWER7
machines, unsupported); is currently the only official arch

All of these but ppc64el have quite regressed. There are rumours that IBM
people have actively pressured a bunch of upstream projects to drop support
for older CPUs. This is unfortunate for the laptop project you're talking
about, as, as I understand, they run ppc64 kernel with powerpc(?) userland.
This means BE, which has no longer official support.

I've never put my hands on any PPC machine, though, ssh and qemu
notwithstanding, thus my knowledge here is only second hand.


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