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“Removal of powerpc as a release architecture”
- user5994461 10y agoIs there any popular hardware that is PowerPC?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jasonjayr 10y agoI was surprised to find an unholy mix of Debian 5 & 6 running on powerpc when I enabled SSH access to my Western Digital MyBook Live Drives: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Western+Digital+My+Book+Live+Teardown/26942 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Western+Digital+My+Book+Live... I don't know if they're still using powerpc on more modern iterations of these devices ...
- rodgerd 10y agoWhich is pretty poor, IMO. They can't afford to fund someone to put a little work back into Debian?
- dschuetz 10y agoYes, there is. The latest Powermacs. Hey, Debian! I have a suggestion! Drop everything except amd64! Who needs all the other crap anyway! Not even ARM, that's crap too!
- icebraining 10y agoWhere were you when they asked for a volunteer to maintain the port? Debian doesn't have paid developers, you know.
- dschuetz 10y agoYepp, that's where the argument goes. "It's for free, don't complain!" Well, now that my projects depend on something that I took for granted, I agree that's my own fault. Next time I'll think before choosing between software distributions. Now, I mostly do not care to use or support Debian in any way. I want to USE it, not maintain. Silly me.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- throwaway2048 10y agoI doubt anyone is going to miss you or care about your use case if you have no interest in stepping up. You are demanding that people that no longer have an interest in something, work for free, for your benefit, while you contribute nothing.
- dschuetz 10y agoThat's the most common fallacy within the Linux community. I use Linux to do something else and contribute there. Wasn't that the intention behind Linux? Provide a common OS to create and contribute different things? I do not use Linux to maintain it. I use it to create something new, as an instrument. I neither have the knowledge, nor the time to acquire it, nor to maintain it. There are people who can do it better than myself. So, after all, it's my fault that maintainers abandon ports, because no one appreciates their work, including me? All I read now is, how dare I to raise the issue. Who am I anyway to raise such an issue, without even being willing to contribute anymore. And that's just plain stupid. As an IT-guy I just begin to hate anything that smells like a "software-community", because not just the software stinks, but also the arguments about it.
- aseipp 10y ago> So, after all, it's my fault that maintainers abandon ports, because no one appreciates their work, including me? No. It is not your fault that maintainers eventually decide to move on. It is nobody's fault. In fact, many maintainers do work in spite of the fact nobody appreciates it. In some cases, it's even a good or great thing to move on -- maintenance is time consuming and there are many other valuable things to do in life, as opposed to writing software, or even simply working on software you think is more important. But it is your fault for making shitty posts like a child on the internet, in attempts to allude that Debian, somehow, is just fucking around with you personally or something -- or that they do not have any rhyme or reason to their decisions to do things like this. Your post might as well have read "why not just get rid of ARM too lulzzzzz amirite guise?!?!?? debian is so dum", like a 4chan pepe meme regurgitator -- and it would have had the same amount of content. It's simply extremely ungrateful to people who have put in 10 years of work on the PPC port already, probably much of it their spare time, to act this way. Nobody is maintaining the port anymore. That's unfortunate if you depended on it. I've been burned by lack of maintenance too. But, here -- it is not a conspiracy against the hardware or an affront to you individually. It's just the reality of the fact nobody wants to support it anymore, and the involved people are moving on. You need to accept that. There's no blame on anyone. It's simply the way it is. The reason you're getting responses that are effectively just brushing you aside, FWIW, is because many people here are involved with or have maintained FOSS to a large degree, software that is diverse, that has been used by many people, and in many contexts. That includes me. Unfortunately, a large part of that territory involves dealing with ungrateful users like yourself, who not only do not understand how such projects tend to function or operate -- but also who interpret choices they dislike as personal attacks, and furthermore contribute nothing of value on their own, or even allege that the motivations behind some decisions are unsound (while, again, having no insight or ability to contribute meaningfully). And I don't mean code. Most users rarely even, if ever, say "thanks". I don't write free code to get thanks, I don't assume it. I do try to assume that when I write code, I won't be treated like shit from ungrateful nobodies. And, as unfortunate as it is, and however much it pains me to say this directly to you -- experience is telling me that, right now frankly, you are just another ungrateful, whiny user who is unlikely to contribute anything of value or substance. And despite the potential possibility that you could contribute things of value, after extensive work -- it's really not in my interests to "work towards" accepting attitudes like yours. There are 10,000 people who are at least 10x as qualified you while being nowhere near as annoying. I can wait for those people. Hell, I'd rather wait for people who are 1/4th as skilled as you and less annoying. At least I'd have the opportunity to mentor or help someone who isn't going to accuse me of bad faith every other decision. Putting up with people like you does not make me any more excited to write or maintain my software, it makes me less excited. This isn't a happy thing to say. But it is the world we live in, and I have better things to do than appease users who act like brats. You'll get less agitated responses if you drop the malicious implicit assumption that Debian or whatever is doing this to spite you, or that people are responding negatively to you are just doing so to troll you because "they can't understand your side".
- justinsaccount 10y agoThe latest Powermacs.. from 2006?
- pcwalton 10y agoNintendo Wii U?
- snerbles 10y agoAlong with all of the prior generation consoles - Xbox 360, PS3, Wii.
- tomash 10y agoWD Mybook Live (a networked hdd for home use). Which, ironically, uses Debian as its operating system internally.
- ForHackernews 10y agoSeems like Western Digital could step up and maintain the Debian build tools for powerpc. ...just kidding, they'll just keep shipping progressively more ancient and insecure versions of Debian.
- pmarin 10y agoNot popular but all "modern" hardware for AmigaOS is PowerPc based. http://www.amigaos.net/content/72/supported-hardware http://www.amigaos.net/content/72/supported-hardware http://www.acube-systems.biz/index.php?page=hardware http://www.acube-systems.biz/index.php?page=hardware
- tw04 10y agoThose are 64-bit ppc CPUs, not the 32-bit that ppc references.
- pmarin 10y agoNone of them are POWER8, the minimum to run Debian ppc64el[1] [1] https://wiki.debian.org/ppc64el#Required_Hardware https://wiki.debian.org/ppc64el#Required_Hardware
- makomk 10y agoAll "modern" hardware for AmigaOS is either discontinued or not yet shipping, and also very expensive for the performance. This seems to be the normal state of affairs - as far as I can tell, by the time any modern AmigaOS hardware has semi-decent driver support it's no longer available, and a bunch of the onboard hardware simply never works properly.
- Matthias247 10y agoQuite a lot of automotive microcontrollers (e.g. for engine control, body control, gateways, ...) from Freescale are based on PowerPC. However you won't find Linux on these.
- pdw 10y agoNote that "powerpc" is the 32-bit PowerPC, if I'm not mistaken. ppc64el (64-bit little-endian PowerPC) is listed as a release architecture.
- bri3d 10y agoppc64el isn't supported on legacy Motorola PowerPC CPUs or IBM POWER7 or lower, so a large swath of 64-bit PowerPC is also unsupported (POWER7, G5, etc.): https://wiki.debian.org/ppc64el https://wiki.debian.org/ppc64el For comparison, Ubuntu discontinued official support for this platform in 2007 (!), although an "unofficial" community port lives on.
- bandrami 10y agoThe port covered both 32 and 64 bit chips. The specific 64 bit little endian support (ie, your old iBook) was broken out into the ppc64el in either Squeeze or Jessie.
- arcticbull 10y agoApple PPC[64] devices were all big endian. Little-endian mode (ppc64le) was introduced on POWER8 circa 2013.
- bandrami 10y agoThe chip itself is ambidextrous or whatever the word is.
- klodolph 10y agoWell, sort of. First of all, the 970 (aka G5) doesn't support little-endian. Second of all, you need board-level support, since the chip only does half of the work.
- andreiw 10y agoThe board-level (chipset) thing hasn't been true since "true" LE support was introduced. So Power8 machines can switch arbitrarily between endianness by changing MSR.LE. In fact, you could even run exception vectors at a different endianness from other code (MSR.ILE != MSR.LE), and endianness doesn't need to match between a hypervisor and VM.
- unethical_ban 10y agoMore detail on why would have been interesting. Especially with other lesser known architectures still supported.
- icebraining 10y agoNo (credible) volunteers to manage the port, it seems: http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-powerpc@lists.debian.org/msg65880.html http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-powerpc@lists.debian.org/...
- jcurbo 10y agoI didn't go look but that was going to be my guess. Since Debian is volunteer-ran, each architecture needs people to manage it, as well as having adequate hardware to test/build on.
- johnl314 10y agoI have an old PowerBook (from about 2005, not long before Apple's intel switch) that still runs fine, after replacing RAM a couple times. I use it as my back-up computer at the office to this day, sometimes bring it to the coffee shop to outhip the hipsters. It's been running the Debian PPC port for many years without much trouble. Of course this does not come as a big surprise; I'll just keep running the most recent version until the hard drive dies and my current laptop becomes the back-up. Are there any distros still standing with PPC support? I used to run Ubuntu, but it was dropped years ago.
- TheGorramBatman 10y agoIts not linux, but NetBSD still has its macppc port. And Gentoo.
- bandrami 10y agoOpenBSD does too
- astrodust 10y agoLooks like Yellowdog Linux is discontinued, but at the time it was great: http://www.fixstars.com/en/technologies/linux/ http://www.fixstars.com/en/technologies/linux/ One of the best features of that distribution was none of the standard pre-compiled root-kits would run on it, plus all the buffer-overflow attacks had to be customized for PowerPC, something few script kiddies had the capability of doing. It made for a surprisingly resilient system at the time.
- Ivoah 10y agoUbuntu MATE supports PPC https://ubuntu-mate.org https://ubuntu-mate.org
- icebraining 10y agoFrom what I can tell, it uses Ubuntu's community supported release of PowerPC.
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- djsumdog 10y agoThis is really sad. I was really hoping the Talos would get funded: https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-systems/talos-secure-workstation https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-systems/talos-s... ..but it looks pretty far from its goal. :( Still it's the best alternative architecture that's free of binary blobs, that isn't ARM. If we do see open ppc hardware, this will mean one less potential OS we can use. EDIT: it looks like they're just dropping older 32-bit PPC per the other comments. So, this doesn't seem as big a deal really.
- detaro 10y agoThe Talos is a POWER8, which is targeted by the ppc64el architecture.
- ktRolster 10y agoI like the power ISA a lot, but as long as we're looking at alternative CPUs, I'd be interested in seeing the mill get a shot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_architecture
- throwaway2048 10y agoNot a meaningful comparison, Power8 is being fabbed right now. The mill dosent even have an FPGA implementation (yet?). Mill is a long way from usable.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nitrogen 10y agoIt's difficult to justify spending $7k for a motherboard and CPU that only sometimes matches the performance of an Intel equivalent at $500. Only the most security-sensitive applications could justify that price. They need an investor with deep pockets and no compromising motives.
- wolfgke 10y ago
- sctb 10y agoWe've updated the title from “Debian drops support for PowerPC”, which breaks the guidelines by being editorialized.
- cgvgffyv 10y agoIt may well have been, but the title as it stands now is useless. I was forced to click through and read all the comments to find out what this was about.
- sctb 10y agoThe title “Release Architectures for Debian 9 'Stretch'” is precisely accurate; it's what the linked article is and was titled that way by the author for a reason. On the other hand, because the article states that the removal of PowerPC is the only change from Jessie we've reverted the title to something that expresses this.
- stretchwithme 10y agoExcellent name. :-)
- AceJohnny2 10y agoMeanwhile, I'm continually amazed that s390x [1] remains supported. I've never seen such a system in the wild. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_on_z_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_on_z_Systems
- RyJones 10y agoI'm working with four of them as build minions for a project. We support both Power and Z as platforms (as well as x86_64) I suspect the reason we're building software for them is someone is using it. I know Hyperledger is supported on Bluemix to some degree.
- e12e 10y agoIn addition to the comment above, about sending old mainframes to deep blue pastures (so to speak), I love how your comment adds to the mystique: "I suspect ... someone is using [the platform]". "Yes, my friend. Deep in the Dark Web, a hundred and one LANs beyond the routable Internet, there roams magnificent, ancient and magical creatures of legend - the great Zee. Quietly they tally numbers, and mete out just rewards to the poor souls trapped in this prosaic concrete reality, unable to so much as cross from our world to the Internet - let alone travel to these fabled realms of the deep, deep blue."
- cartoonfoxes 10y ago> "Yes, my friend. Deep in the Dark Web, a hundred and one LANs beyond the routable Internet, there roams magnificent, ancient and magical creatures of legend - the great Zee. Quietly they tally numbers, and mete out just rewards to the poor souls trapped in this prosaic concrete reality, unable to so much as cross from our world to the Internet - let alone travel to these fabled realms of the deep, deep blue." I think I'll tweak this a bit and put it on a shirt.
- e12e 10y agoI have no idea how you're going to fit all that on a tie or a pocket protector. Some history on uniforms of those that have most closely attended the Zee herd: https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/waywewore/waywewore_1.html https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/waywewore/waywew... I must say, this guy here, he's really onto something: https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/waywewore/waywewore_30.html https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/waywewore/waywew... Such power, and so much blue. In all seriousness, please share your tweaks.
- JeremyMorgan 10y agoSad, but a day everyone knew would come. I totally understand the lack of support for a dead architecture. It's not like you can just keep throwing software at these machines and run them fine anyway. I have a 2003-04 era Powerbook with Ubuntu on it. It runs 10.04 just fine, but any newer and it's pretty damn slow. Basically the only thing I can do with it now is text based stuff, and not much of it. Some Python, bash C++ etc. Can't even really browse the web, because the newer versions of any web browser won't run/compile. Since I can do all of those same things on my current laptop just fine there's no motivation to use the PPC mac other than nostalgia. Imagine how the folks feel trying to support it now?
- Gracana 10y agoIt frustrates me that computers become obsolete this way. We've generated an awful lot of waste and not a whole lot of progress. Everything I do now I could do ten years ago, it's just "prettier" now. I'd go back to one of these old machines in an instant if it didn't mean that reading articles on the web would be so painful.
- reflexive 10y agoWe've generated an awful lot of waste and not a whole lot of progress. For some to succeed, others must fail. It's not possible to keep every CPU design ever conceived in production. PowerPC lost. There's not an infinite amount of software engineering resources to support every discontinued architecture. I'd go back to one of these old machines in an instant if it didn't mean that reading articles on the web would be so painful. If you really feel strongly, this is an opportunity for you to get involved in Linux maintenance.
- notalaser 10y agoThe underlying problem that the parent post was trying to point out is that the programs we run today largely do pretty much the same things that they did 10 years ago, but for some reason they require vastly more powerful hardware, with questionable gains. A modern browser crawls on my old iBook G3, even when all it has to display is the HN homepage. And it crawls on the web in general; it would be clever engineering if it were slow only on websites that use super modern features, like WebGL, but the whole things grinds to a halt when reading a newspaper's website, even though the website is fundamentally the same as it was ten years ago. The same goes for virtually every other kind of software. My computer is at least an order of magnitude faster than the one I owned ten years ago, but the quality, or at least the speed of my usage is pretty much the same. This sounds less like progress and more like running in circles :-).
- patrickg_zill 10y agoWhile it may be petty to say, I think it is accurate to point out that this sort of news tends to lead people to focus on the "winning" commodity architectures, in this case x64 and ARM, and minimize the use of other architectures. If I were starting a business today, you'd have to give me free hardware that used POWER or SPARC cpu in order to persuade me to use it. The last thing I want is to have to switch hardware platforms; and thus x64 and ARM are the safe choices.
- chc 10y agoYou've kind of got the cart before the horse. People already minimize the use of PowerPC, and that's why Debian is dropping it.
- dmh2000 10y agomost of this thread is concerned with the desktop. but powerpc is widely used in the automotive systems. Those systems are running either some form of Linux, an RTOS or a bareboard exec. The modern powerpc SOC's are available in very wide temperature ranges (-40..+125) which makes them attractive for automotive. The QorIQ ppc's are used in networking also.
- planteen 10y agoThe Linux kernel still has support. Running Debian is no longer an option, but I doubt many embedded systems were doing that anyway. Most probably were running some Yocto image from the SoC vendor. So it just means cross compiling from source now.
- kakwa_ 10y agocrap. Since jessie, I could not maintain my old Sparc V100 server. Now it's my PowerBook G3 Pismo :( (to be true, it wasn't very usable anymore, 45 seconds 100% CPU to load the main gmail page just to give an idea).