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I'd personally like to see the FOSS community try to embrace the POWER architecture: Ubuntu/Canonical are major members of the OpenPOWER foundation [1], so at l
by riscy 11y ago
I'd personally like to see the FOSS community try to embrace the POWER architecture: Ubuntu/Canonical are major members of the OpenPOWER foundation [1], so at least an entity sympathetic with our philosophy has an influence on the architecture.
[1] http://openpowerfoundation.org http://openpowerfoundation.org
- nickpsecurity 11y agoRed Hat has supported POWER for a long time. Debian does. Even Mint had a PPC release. The big BSD's do. Amiga's are still on PPC haha. I think it's not a question of FOSS support by OS developers. It's the users and app that don't commit to x86 alternatives.
- makomk 11y agoOne issue with PPC and POWER is that they're generally big-endian and everything assumes little-endian these days thanks to x86. Even JavaScript is little-endian now.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoThat's one of those sad realities of Worse is Better in action. Definitely a disadvantage. Far as why big-endian was The Right Thing, drfuchs had this to say: "Because big-endian matches how most humans have done it for most of history ("five hundred twenty one" is written "521" or "DXXI", not "125" or "IXXD"). Because the left-most bit in a byte is the high-order bit, so the left-most byte in a word should be the high-order byte. Because ordering two 8-character ascii strings can be done with a single 8-byte integer compare instruction (with the obvious generalizations). Because looking for 0x12345678 in a hex dump (visually or with an automatic tool) isn't a maddening task. Because manipulating 1-bit-per-pixel image data and frame buffers (shifting left and right, particularly) doesn't lead to despair. Because that's how any right-thinking person's brain works."
- wolfgke 11y agoIt is not obvious whether big or little endian is better. For a nice overview read https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/little-endian-vs-big-endian/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/little-endian-vs-bi...
- nickpsecurity 11y agoThanks for the feedback. I'll add it to my collection for this subject and think on it in the future.
- nradov 11y agoThis issue has been argued incessantly for 40+ years. You should read the famous article "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace". https://www.ietf.org/rfc/ien/ien137.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/ien/ien137.txt There is no clear "right" answer.
- edwintorok 11y agoAccording to the specs linked in the OP that POWER8 supports little-endian mode too.
- snuxoll 11y agoAnd most PPC distributions are building for little-endian mode as well. OpenSUSE Leap is only available for ppc64le, Fedora only builds for ppc64le now as well.
- gecko 11y agoThe POWER line, and all PowerPCs except the G5, are actually bi-endian, and quite a few operating systems run in little-endian mode (including all vaguely recent Linux releases I know). The G5's lack of a bi-endian mode is why VirtualPC didn't ship on it for a long time (if at all; I don't even remember).
- broodbucket 11y agoThis is FUD, POWER8 is bi-endian and they're pushing LE as standard with the OpenPOWER ABI.
- zanny 11y agoA compromise for IBM might be to release old iterations of the ISA under liberal licensing terms like RISC-V or SPARC. Throw in open release of blueprints 5 years after first printout and I'd be fine with that as our collective target for free and open computing going forward.
- lolidaisuki 11y agoRaptorengineering is planning to release computer that's based on OpenPOWER. https://raptorengineeringinc.com/TALOS/prerelease.php https://raptorengineeringinc.com/TALOS/prerelease.php