SPARC Status (Was Re: Secondary Architecture Status?)

[Tom Lane]

Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> writes:
>> I would really like to see a proliferation of secondary arches in
>> Fedora, but I don't think 'workstation' is a viable usage model for
>> them to get started.  Most will have to focus on the type of hardware
>> that actually sells for that arch, and yes I realize that can be at
>> odds with some of the directions Fedora is going.

> I think there are most likely two candidates for a secondary arch
> other than PPC. The first is sparc where from the server point of view
> where its probably about as prolific as PPC in that regard. The second
> would be arm but that is more from the NetBook/MID/Phone/STB
> perspective where there are quite a few devices in the 500Mhz-1Ghz
> range with 256-512Mb RAM. With the OLPC X0-1 we've proven that Fedora
> can run relatively well on that sort of spec, they also tend to be
> relatively cheap.

The problem that I've got with relegating PPC to a secondary arch is
exactly that there are few other candidates for arches that will command
enough interest to force maintainers to pay attention.  And that will
mean that Fedora becomes an x86 monoculture over time --- apps won't
work on anything else, and their maintainers won't take any interest in
fixing them, and that provides reason for other maintainers to stop
worrying about portability of their apps, and it's a vicious circle.

Right now, people are at least compelled to pay some attention to basic
issues like endianness.  If the only primary arches are little-endian
then hardware independence is going to disappear.

			regards, tom lane