IBM Power11 CPUs Launching In 2025 - Linux 6.13 Preps KVM Nested Guests For Power11

[coder]

Don't forget Amiga's. There are still new Amiga PC's and boards that use PowerPC.

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but the Amiga machines from the 1990's were all based on Motorola 68k.

[NeoMorpheus]

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but the Amiga machines from the 1990's were all based on Motorola 68k.

Maybe he is talking about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOne_X1000

But as far as I remember, Atari and Commodore never migrated from 68k to PowerPC like Apple did.

[mixov]

Bullshit. All of the enterprise distros for POWER are Little Endian (Red Hat, Ubuntu, and SuSE).

You have to go to fringe distros, like rene's T2 Linux, if you want Big Endian. And if you do, I wouldn't expect the same level of reliability, because most of the world is using Little Endian and that code path is therefore way better tested and maintained. That said, I don't think it's a bad thing that people still have a choice in the matter.

Then why would Linus even mention testing for big endian at all?

[edwaleni]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) offers big endian and little endian variants for IBM Power Systems servers:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM/Z is big endian.

[edwaleni]

Go nuts!

https://www.amigaos.net/

[brad0]

True, but it was hugely popular in embedded applications and video games by the time Apple stopped using it.

Networking appliaciances, network switches, etc. , I/O controllers (e.g. RAID adapters), various embedded applications, etc. Very popular.

[brad0]

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but the Amiga machines from the 1990's were all based on Motorola 68k.

Amigas have been using PowerPC for decades. 68k systems are the older Amigas.

[brad0]

You have to go to fringe distros, like rene's T2 Linux, if you want Big Endian. And if you do, I wouldn't expect the same level of reliability, because most of the world is using Little Endian and that code path is therefore way better tested and maintained. That said, I don't think it's a bad thing that people still have a choice in the matter.

Debian and Gentoo are fringe? That's not true.

[brad0]

Then why would Linus even mention testing for big endian at all?

What he said is not true and Linus cares to not do a half assed shitty job.

[coder]

Debian and Gentoo are fringe? That's not true.

The only current Debian downloadable POWER images I see appear to be for little endian.

And if you look at the Gentoo options, it certainly appears like they're headed towards little endian, with two of the three PPC/POWER options being for LE and the latter two focusing on modern hardware. There BE download sounds like it's oriented mainly towards legacy support.

https://www.gentoo.org/downloads/#ppc