Gentoo/PPC64 Beta Live CDs Released

pvdabeel writes "Gentoo/PPC developer, IBM employee and former PPC64 kernel maintainer Tom Gall has announced beta-level live CDs and stages for ppc64. The hardware supported by gentoo-ppc64 is PowerMacintosh G5, IBM pSeries, older IBM 64 bit RS/6000s (such as the model 260, 270, F80, H80, see linuxppc64.org for a complete list) and soon IBM iSeries hardware. Gentoo-ppc64 is the other side of the ppc equation, it is a 64-bit kernel as well as a 64 bit user space. We are the first linux distribution to offer a 64-bit top-to-bottom solution which is not a toy environment. This is a significant and exciting step as there is interest in cluster computing circles, users of java, and more generally those who have needs of large address spaces. It's fairly exciting to be on the forefront and continue to push the capabilities of linux on ppc64 forward."

Comments

How are SLES and RHEL toys?

[Wesley Felter]

They've had PPC64 versions for a while, and they seem to work.

Re:How are SLES and RHEL toys?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, SLES and RHEL have been around quite a while, and both of them work great. The big difference is "top to bottom 64-bit enviroment". On SLES and RHEL, most of userspace is 32-bit.

It can be argued that there's any value in having a fully 64-bit userspace. You don't need a 64-bit ls or bash. But you can have them, it's not much slower than 32 bit and it works.

Re:How are SLES and RHEL toys?

[Marcus Meissner]

Yes, userspace is 32bit but all of IBM, Redhat and SUSE have worked pretty hard on getting the toolchain (gcc, binutils, glibc) to work and Redhat and SUSE have put significant efforts into making applications work on the ppc64 platform.

Whoever thinks that ./configure ; make ; make install is sufficient when a new platform appears is usually mistaken.

Those 3 Linux giants have been working on this for you since mid of 2002, and it just proves
the effectiveness of OpenSource that now gentoo can step up and can now freely use the fruits of their labor. :)

And the decision for RH and SUSE not shipping
a 64bit distribution is that 64bit PowerPC code is slower than 32bit. However, both include
64bit runtime and development environments.

Ciao, Marcus (actually one of the SUSE PowerPC developers)

Re:NOT the first full 64 bit

[End11]

I am REALLY getting sick of Apple Zealotry about 64bit or fastest computer or best interface or what have you.

Did you even read it?

We are the first linux distribution to offer a 64-bit top-to-bottom solution which is not a toy environment.

Where does it say anything about being the first 64 bit environment period, or in fact anything about apple being good? Gah I don't know why I'm even responding to crap like this.

Re:NOT the first full 64 bit

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you need the OS to be "64 bit native"? Fundamentally, all you really need is for the memory APIs to support the full 64 bit addressing mode; the ABIs to support the 64 bit registers; and not much more that I can think of offhand (feel free to correct me).

User-space utilities don't need to be 64 bit native. In fact, taking Solaris as an example, there's a lot of utilities that are 32 bit apps. Why? They're faster that way. If you only need to manipulate 32 bit numbers, compiling them in 64 bit mode means moving twice as much data as you need to, be it for pointers, integers, or similar.

It's a different story on x86. There, you have a paucity of general purpose registers; because the 64 bit platform brings additional registers to the table, you gain by compiling in 64 bit mode in order to be able to access those registers. That's the only reason, though. POWER, PowerPC, and SPARC were all designed in such a way that there's no drawback to using 32 bit mode in this regard; they already have adequate registers available.

In short: know what the cost/benefit of something is before you jump on it, body and soul. Having 64 bit capability is good. Knowing when to use it, and when not to, is better.

Re:NOT the first full 64 bit

[HalfFlat]

[...] Alpha never made PC's

Digital released the DEC Mulita in 1995. Definitely 64-bit. Ran Windows NT. Was targetted for the PC niche (not home niche though) - it was designed to be small and cheap, even using a 2.5" disk drive. It was a PC.

Also regarding Apple's claim, the Opteron had been out for a while, and it's hard to think of any good metrics for distinguishing between workstations and PCs that would exclude Opteron-based machines and include the G5.

Lastly, the G5 may be a 64-bit processor, but one can't call OS X a 64-bit operating system, at least not yet.

Re:Now if IBM had something comparable to a G5 sys

[eric17]

There's an evaluation board by momentum: www.970eval.com. Hopefully the price falls...

Other 64-bit linuxen

[mcelrath]

We are the first linux distribution to offer a 64-bit top-to-bottom solution which is not a toy environment.

I would point out that above statement is incorrect. Redhat released several versions for the Alpha. Debian has support for both the Alpha and Sparc64. These are true 64-bit top-to-bottom solutions.

-- Bob

Re:WTF? Why would I run this on my G5?

[typhoonius]

Read the fucking, uh, summary: "a 64-bit kernel as well as a 64 bit user space." OS X, while lovely, is not a 64-bit operating system.

(Also, PowerMac G5s aren't the only computers that use the PowerPC 970; IBM also sells some.)

Re:Video encoding

[Anonymous Coward]

Not any faster, since MPEG-4 doesn't use gigabytes of memory or 64-bit integers.

Re:WTF? Why would I run this on my G5?

[Anonymous Coward]

For one thing, a 64-bit operating system, you "3, Insightful" moron.

Cut+paste the following short C program into a text file, and compile it with "gcc whatever_you_called_it.c"

#include "stdio.h"
int main(void) {
if(sizeof(void *)==8)
printf("Hooray, this is a 64-bit system!\n");
if(sizeof(void *)==4)
printf("Damn it :( still 32-bits in here.\n");
exit(0);
}

On: Alpha, HPPA64, PPC64, IA64, x86-64 (in 64bit mode), MIPS (in 64bit mode), you get the "Hooray".
On Mac OSX, you get the "Damn". Yes, even on a G5. A G5 might have 64-bit CPUs, but it doesn't have a 64-bit OS. Linux/PPC64 is such an OS.

A good filesystem is another nice thing Linux has that OS X doesn't. XFS and Reiser4 to name just two :)

mysql on fedora 2

[David Jao]

the further you get away from the "standard" i386 the worse support gets. Look at Fedora Core 2 for AMD64 - mysql is 32bit...

Um, this statement is false. The mysql server and client are fully 64-bit... here's proof.

While we have dozens of distributions there is not a single 64bit Linux out there that is even close to being as full-featured as debian, fedora, redhat, mandrake,... on i386 are...

If you want something as full-featured as i386, then (aside from simply running i386) x86-64 is the best game in town, because it actually runs i386 binaries. For example, my copy of Mathematica for i386 Linux runs perfectly in Fedora 2 x86-64.

As an aside, x86-64 clearly contradicts the story summary's claim of being the "first linux distribution to offer a 64-bit top-to-bottom solution which is not a toy environment." Red Hat Enterprise 3 for AMD64 was released six months ago with a full 64-bit userspace environment, and I don't think anybody can seriously argue that RHEL3 is a "toy environment" compared to a beta gentoo-ppc64 release.

Re:Friendly environmentally

[You're All Wrong]

And to be pedantic, their statement is also just plain false.
Some of us have been running Alpha servers using Redhat, SuSE, Debian, etc. linux since before Gentoo was even founded.
Alphas have been 64-bit since day one (1992), as have the Linux distributions on them. (MS released a crippled 32-bit version of Windows for it, but Linux and *BSD have always been the real deal.)

YAW.