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IBM Launches Power site For Developers

Posted by Hemos on from the powering-it-up dept.

LeninZhiv writes "Celebrating five years of DevelopperWorks goodness, IBM has just launched a new section dedicated to the Power architecture. Initial stories include such goodies as "the developerWorks' Power Architecture challenge" and the Linux on Power Architecture toolkit. May this usher in a new era of community support for Linux on POWER outside IBM?"

4 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Linux is available in PPC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    www.yellowdoglinux.com

    1. Re:Linux is available in PPC by bigredradio · · Score: 4, Informative

      To further elaborate, Linux on PPC IS similar, however, with Linux on Power you are more likely talking about 64-bit architecture (until the G5, there were no 64-bit Macs). Also the boot process for Macs and pSeries is very different. This is one of the reasons why distros that run on macs do not install on pSeries. (unless they specifically support pSeries).

      For an out-of-the-box install, that leaves you with SLES and RHEL. You can hack Debian and Gentoo to work. Yellowdog (AFAIK) does not support pSeries at this time, but plans to in the future.

      Storix Software PowerPC Development

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  2. Re:Quick Question by Johnny+Mnemonic · · Score: 5, Insightful


    Apple and IBM have been growing closer together, as a result of a) Apple using IBM's processors in their workstations, and b) IBM and Apple both rediscovering UNIX, esp the OSS kind.

    Although IBM and Apple are just dating, I think that there are plans to have each other meet their parents. Doesn't it strike you as curious that IBM branded workstations a) ship with Windows, when IBM is pushing Linux and b) ship with a competitors CPU? Is it so curious that IBM might blush a little that OS X is non-windows and uses their own CPU?

    Read through the Developer Site for Linux on POWER processors, and you'll find more than a few references to Yellow Dog Linux, which is Linux for PPC (particularly Macs) and even includes as a prize in a developer competition a new Apple G5 (with YDL pre-installed). Interesting that IBM doesn't see fit to award their own brand of personal computer, which I think underscores my point. Do they think that a G5 is somehow more desireable than a ThinkCentre?

    And it's working on me: as a long time Apple tech supporter, I'm now in the position to recommend Windows PCs; and when I do, I rec IBMs. And not Dells.

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  3. Re:Clearcase by Guy+Harris · · Score: 4, Insightful
    It's already available for AIX, so the instruction set can't be a problem.

    When porting from one OS to another, the instruction set is probably rarely the main problem. (Not "never a problem", although I suspect the main instruction-set-related problems are

    1. byte-order issues (software not taking byte order into account and working only on little-endian or only on big-endian platforms);
    2. alignment requirement issues (software assuming that unaligned pointers can be dereferenced safely and not working on, for example, SPARC processors, where an unaligned dereference, unless the compiler is generating "safe" code, will get an alignment fault).)

    If ClearCase still uses an installable file system in the OS kernel, that'd probably be the biggest issue for a port to a new OS - different UN*Xes have different VFS layers. Beyond that, there might be issues with deficiencies in the new target OS's implementation of particular APIs, or the lack of particular APIs in the new target OS, for example.