Debian 9 "Stretch" Drops PowerPC As A Release Architecture

[trek]

Are they dropping support for POWER8?

no, it is the ppc64el architecture, that is untouched

[dungeon]

Are they dropping support for POWER8?

Nope... drop is just for PowerPC32, say PowerPC Macs if you want as pretty much those Mac oldies were major users anyway

[sjukfan]

Only because I just bought a Mac Mini G4.

[ZeDestructor]

And here I thought this was about dropping all POWER … at least mention it like "(32-bit) PowerPC" in the title …

Talk about clickbait indeed...

[-MacNuke-]

I have an old PowerMac G4 MDD (with a Radeon 9000) at home. I think I tested Debian 7 at this time. It boots but the graphics in Xorg are just garbled. I found out that disabling KMS and AGP and such stuff solves some of them but it is horribly slow after this.

Another "problem" is that most Desktop Environments using OpenGL 2.1. So any modern Desktop falls back to LLVMpipe. I know I could swap the graphics card with a more modern one (I heard you can mod one of the last AGP cards) but this is just burning money.

A Raspberry Pi 3 is way faster than this machine.

[schmidtbag]

You'd think they'd drop i386 before dropping PPC, but whatever... I don't have any use for either.

Definitely not going to happen any time soon. i386 with PAE is going to stick around for a long time. You can probably blame Intel and Valve for that: Intel because they still have some pretty new CPUs that are still 32-bit, and Valve because they work a lot with Debian and didn't enforce 64-bit binaries from the very beginning, and they really should have.

[mulenmar]

...just after I bought a Mac Mini G4 and PowerMac G4 MDD. *sigh* Hopefully the port will be re-added after release.

I don't think the AmigaOne folks are going to like this one bit, either.

[mulenmar]

I have an old PowerMac G4 MDD (with a Radeon 9000) at home.
...
A Raspberry Pi 3 is way faster than this machine.

It's also:

• Not as upgradeable. Don't laugh, I have an PATA Blu-ray player, and SATA adapters do exist. Toss in an SSD!
• Shares the bandwidth between the USB and Ethernet controllers.
• Doesn't have Firewire.
• Due to above, attempting to use an external hard or optical drive at the same time as a hard-wire net connection isn't as fast as it should be.
• Boots a binary blob on the GPU in order to bring up the main CPU and its operating system. As I understand it, toolchain support for this VideoCore IV is a bit painful, so replacing this is difficult.
• Said GPU has full access to all RAM and, iirc, does not have an MMU.
• Said GPU's driver requires its own blob for certain video acceleration functionality -- this situation has improved greatly with Broadcom's efforts to open-up what they can, but I don't think they can expose the video playback stuff? Idk, idc.
• Not PowerPC or Power4 based.
• Not big-endian. ARM is bi-endian, but Raspian is little-endian. I think the aforementioned blob bootloader that starts up the CPU sets it to little-endian...which can't be changed that I can find.

Given the existence of things like the AmigaOne X1000 and X5000, and the upcoming Talos Secure Workstation, developers need to be able to test their code and build environments in a big-endian environment. PPC Macs offer a relatively-cheap place to start, without having to shell out US$1000+ for new hardware.

(Yes, I know the Talos will be POWER8, which is bi-endian, and not PowerPC. The AmigaONEs and the smaller boards, however, are PPC.)

[bug77]

Definitely not going to happen any time soon. i386 with PAE is going to stick around for a long time. You can probably blame Intel and Valve for that: Intel because they still have some pretty new CPUs that are still 32-bit, and Valve because they work a lot with Debian and didn't enforce 64-bit binaries from the very beginning, and they really should have.

Ah, that's the part I was missing, thanks for the heads-up.

[rmoog]

They didn't even finish the no-multilib ppc64 port.