PPC64 To Be Discontinued In Fedora 29, Favoring PPC64LE For POWER

[phoronix]

Phoronix: PPC64 To Be Discontinued In Fedora 29, Favoring PPC64LE For POWER

Fedora is planning to discontinue the POWER PPC64 architecture support within their Linux distribution as far as the big endian favor is concerned. But PPC64LE (little endian) is where they will exclusively focus their POWER architecture attention...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=POWER-PPC64-Discontinue-Fedora

[CrystalGamma]

typo: big endian favor

I assume you mean 'flavo(u)r' …

[ssokolow]

The way things are going, it feels like emulators will soon be the only widespread way to test whether code that's supposed to be portable has no endianness-related bugs.

[phantomas]

The way things are going, it feels like emulators will soon be the only widespread way to test whether code that's supposed to be portable has no endianness-related bugs.

On the emulator topic, in the company I am currently working, we are using an emulator I wrote to help us recognize and improve issues with a protocol we are using. This way we can debug the protocol while the actual hardware is being made and it's not ready yet. Emulators are a really easy and fast way to test things without the actual hardware!

[carewolf]

The way things are going, it feels like emulators will soon be the only widespread way to test whether code that's supposed to be portable has no endianness-related bugs.

But which OS would you install on the emulator? I have been using emulators for that for years but are running out of maintained distros.

[Ray54]

A long time ago (Motorolla 68000 days) big endian was considered better than little endian (old DEC and Intel), as network traffic is always in big endian format on the line, so could be processed quicker. I guess this advantage for big endian has disappeared?

[Weasel]

Big Endian is completely inferior to Little Endian and offers absolutely nothing technically superior. In fact the only reason it even exists in the first place is due to the retarded way humans write digits backwards and for those who look at a memory dump and want to see it in the same (stupid) way. It shouldn't have ever been a thing.

Think about it, to read a number in big endian, you need to know how many digits it has, so you have to first scan the entire number in your head, then you can proceed with the first digit (i.e. one hundred has 3 digits) and so on. With little endian you don't give a shit how many digits it has, you always start with the least significant digit and go up.

Human systems are not anywhere near good. Big endian makes as much sense as decimal arithmetic in computers, both are retarded.

That said, I'm not really for dropping this architecture, to me that's always a bad thing, but yeah what monraaf said is pretty much true.

[coder]

PPC64LE (little endian) is where they will exclusively focus their POWER architecture attention...

This is the correct decision.

[coder]

The way things are going, it feels like emulators will soon be the only widespread way to test whether code that's supposed to be portable has no endianness-related bugs.

Well, if all architectures that aren't little endian just die off, then there's not really a need to test for or avoid such bugs.

[coder]

But since it's not brand-spanking new shiny hardware, Michael is ignoring these things.

No, because nobody is sending him hardware to test (or giving him remote access to especially sexy and exclusive machines), he is ignoring these things.