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Warning: rant (sorta) I remember discussing with an IBM representative at one of the last CeBIT shows (was it 2016?) that the community who did open source dev

Warning: rant (sorta) I remember discussing with an IBM representative at one of the last CeBIT shows (was it 2016?) that the community who did open source development on non-x86 were gravitating away from POWER/PowerPC towards ARM. The affordable hardware was a major selling point. His offered "solution" was that IBM granted free access to its POWER cloud. But that is of course not interesting for someone who runs a home lab and works on Linux distros. And even so, the blog post still does not aim to where they need to aim. Raptor systems are far from "affordable" for your average CS undergraduate or hobbyist. Power Pi's $250 target price is still off by almost an order of magnitude. The $250+ market is served by second-hand POWER servers, which are ok for home labs. Unfortunately, Ubuntu and IBM in their infinite wisdom decided to drop POWER8 support from upcoming releases, which will drive away home labs and the open source community further from Power. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-22.04-LTS-POWER9 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-2...

nix23 5y ago
>His offered "solution" was that IBM granted free access to its POWER cloud. Yeah the mainframe community asked ibm to open some newer systems >24bit but ibm told them they want to provide the community with new "actual" software...out of that came that stupid program called "master the mainframe" or "IBM Z Xplore" it's unbelievable that they are so tone-deaf even to the most loyal IBM fans...IBM is the perfect example of a marketing/management and anti-engineer company (as of today), they really deserve to have a slow death.
pabs3 5y ago
I think Debian still supports POWER8 (and has unofficial ports for 32-bit PowerPC and for big-endian POWER).
- chithanh 5y ago
  The problem about Ubuntu dropping POWER8 support isn't that hardware owners won't find another distro to run. The problem is that home lab owners who develop on their second-hand POWER8 hardware can no longer have the same software environment as the POWER9 systems running latest Ubuntu that they deploy to. And Ubuntu is very popular in the Cloud.

nix23 5y ago

>His offered "solution" was that IBM granted free access to its POWER cloud. Yeah the mainframe community asked ibm to open some newer systems >24bit but ibm told them they want to provide the community with new "actual" software...out of that came that stupid program called "master the mainframe" or "IBM Z Xplore" it's unbelievable that they are so tone-deaf even to the most loyal IBM fans...IBM is the perfect example of a marketing/management and anti-engineer company (as of today), they really deserve to have a slow death.

pabs3 5y ago

I think Debian still supports POWER8 (and has unofficial ports for 32-bit PowerPC and for big-endian POWER).

chithanh 5y ago
The problem about Ubuntu dropping POWER8 support isn't that hardware owners won't find another distro to run. The problem is that home lab owners who develop on their second-hand POWER8 hardware can no longer have the same software environment as the POWER9 systems running latest Ubuntu that they deploy to. And Ubuntu is very popular in the Cloud.