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Linux has supported little-endian POWER for several years. It makes porting userspace software tremendously easier since that the major architectures in use wi
by hapless 12y ago
Linux has supported little-endian POWER for several years. It makes porting userspace software tremendously easier since that the major architectures in use with Linux (x86_64, ARM, MIPS) are frequently LE.
The big news here is official support for KVM on POWER. Use all your existing automation, Openstack, etc, unchanged.
- zurn 12y agoKVM support indeed sounds nice, though they advertised it already before for POWER7/PPC970 hardware... Re endianness, Linux is comfortably bi-endian and so is approximately all portable Linux software. Certainly there isn't any "tremendous" difficulty, which is why I was expressing surprise at ditching the standard big-endian ppc64 userspace. When people first started floating around the little endian PPC patches in 2010 it seems the motivation was some GPU hardware (http://lwn.net/Articles/408848/ http://lwn.net/Articles/408848/) but that doesn't really make sense in this case.
- hapless 12y agonotably the goal with the GPU hardware was to avoid doing endianess conversions in userspace code that talked to GPU drivers. userspace, the root of all evil