
“Removal of powerpc as a release architecture” - bandrami
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2016/10/msg00008.html
======
JeremyMorgan
Sad, but a day everyone knew would come. I totally understand the lack of
support for a dead architecture. It's not like you can just keep throwing
software at these machines and run them fine anyway.

I have a 2003-04 era Powerbook with Ubuntu on it. It runs 10.04 just fine, but
any newer and it's pretty damn slow. Basically the only thing I can do with it
now is text based stuff, and not much of it. Some Python, bash C++ etc. Can't
even really browse the web, because the newer versions of any web browser
won't run/compile.

Since I can do all of those same things on my current laptop just fine there's
no motivation to use the PPC mac other than nostalgia. Imagine how the folks
feel trying to support it now?

~~~
Gracana
It frustrates me that computers become obsolete this way. We've generated an
awful lot of waste and not a whole lot of progress. Everything I do now I
could do ten years ago, it's just "prettier" now. I'd go back to one of these
old machines in an instant if it didn't mean that reading articles on the web
would be so painful.

~~~
Frondo
This comment reminds me of a story I heard years, years ago. I was living in
central Asia, in one of the post-Soviet countries. (As an aside, I met quite a
few people there who much preferred life under Soviet rule. Sometimes at
parties in the countryside they'd even start singing rousing choruses of the
soviet anthem!)

Anyway, the apocryphal story goes, Krushchev is visiting a Western washing
machine factory. He sees all the different models coming off the line, this
one has two agigtators, that one has three speeds, whatever. He sees the churn
of factory equipment. All that hustle and bustle to try and sell more washing
machines.

He laments, "Oh, you capitalists, you're _so_ inefficient. Look at how much
time and effort you waste on with all this competition! We soviets made one
washing machine, and it works!"

~~~
negativity
It's a little deceptive to label these kinds of sentiments as contrary to the
premise of innovation.

Experiments, by nature, require expendable resources, but an finished
appliance intended for a consumer, with no end-user-servicable internals is
not the sort of thing you want to have spewing garbage in all directions.

The reality though, is that we're all being railroaded down strict paths of
planned obsolesence that are integrated into business models from day one.

Yours and my waste should not be interpretted as an unforced error. It's
carefully planned, with the intent to fund more plannings sessions to forecast
more waste.

...at least down among these lower eschelons we inhabit (speaking for myself,
so as not to make assumptions about who reads this), and then there are those
who ride above it all and skim from the fruits of our obesity.

~~~
Retric
There are side channels for places like apartment complexes that want a much
longer device lifespan and are willing to pay for it. Planned obsolesce is
much more common on the 'mass market' channels than the industrial channels.

You really can still buy refrigerators that will last 30 years. They just
don't have built in ice makers etc.

PS: The 50-200% premium may seem steep, but if it lasts 5x as long then you
more than break even.

~~~
noja
Where can I buy these 30 year refrigerators?

~~~
Retric
As a consumer a Sub Zero fridge tends to last over 20 years on average. And
significantly longer than that if you clean the condenser annually.

Past that, Arctic Air for example has commercial refrigerators which will last
30+ years if you do some occasional repairs. Though, they really don't look
like home units.

------
pdw
Note that "powerpc" is the 32-bit PowerPC, if I'm not mistaken.

ppc64el (64-bit little-endian PowerPC) is listed as a release architecture.

~~~
bandrami
The port covered both 32 and 64 bit chips. The specific 64 bit little endian
support (ie, your old iBook) was broken out into the ppc64el in either Squeeze
or Jessie.

~~~
arcticbull
Apple PPC[64] devices were all big endian. Little-endian mode (ppc64le) was
introduced on POWER8 circa 2013.

~~~
bandrami
The chip itself is ambidextrous or whatever the word is.

~~~
arcticbull
It depends on what you mean; the PowerPC 970 (G5) did not support little
endian mode at all. Earlier PowerPC devices (dating back to the PowerPC 601
IIRC) do in fact support runtime switching of endianness, although they were
all 32-bit. PowerPC 64 LE is only supported on POWER8 (and apparently, per
other commenters, requires hardware support although as a Mac developer I
stopped paying attention after the 970 for some reason :)

I think it's probably fair to say all the Apple devices that shipped were big
endian as the OS and firmware were, and while in theory the 32-bit machines
could operate in little-endian mode I don't know of any distributions that
actually did so, and 970 didn't support it.

~~~
tropo
Matrox (yes, the graphics card company) sold a PCI board with several PowerPC
"G4" chips that ran little-endian Linux. They posted a smallish kernel patch
for this.

MC/OS and Windows NT 4.0 also ran little-endian on PowerPC.

The hardware support was simple: swap all 8 byte lanes for every memory
access. It only mattered when MMIO or DMA was involved, so a software-only
alternative was to have the OS do that -- but disk access via DMA would make
the software solution impractical.

------
djsumdog
This is really sad. I was really hoping the Talos would get funded:

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-
systems/talos-s...](https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-
systems/talos-secure-workstation)

..but it looks pretty far from its goal. :( Still it's the best alternative
architecture that's free of binary blobs, that isn't ARM. If we do see open
ppc hardware, this will mean one less potential OS we can use.

EDIT: it looks like they're just dropping older 32-bit PPC per the other
comments. So, this doesn't seem as big a deal really.

~~~
nitrogen
It's difficult to justify spending $7k for a motherboard and CPU that only
sometimes matches the performance of an Intel equivalent at $500. Only the
most security-sensitive applications could justify that price. They need an
investor with deep pockets and no compromising motives.

~~~
wolfgke
> It's difficult to justify spending $7k for a motherboard and CPU

$7,500 is for the complete workstation. The mainboard is $4,100:

> [https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-
> systems/talos-s...](https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-
> systems/talos-secure-workstation)

~~~
detaro
And you need to add at least $1100-$3000 for the CPU, so it's still >=$5200.
Note that your price for the "complete workstation" does not include a CPU
either.

------
AceJohnny2
Meanwhile, I'm continually amazed that s390x [1] remains supported. I've never
seen such a system in the wild.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_on_z_Systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_on_z_Systems)

~~~
theandrewbailey
I took a university course that was specifically about IBM midrange machines.
The instructor had one on his desk. I remember that the whole architecture was
based around virtual machines. One assignment involved downloading a 5250
emulator and logging into some IBM mainframe to leave a message. I even got a
t-shirt for that.

Unfortunately, the instructor quit about a month into the course. Just one
day, we came into the room and some higher up faculty were there instead. I
don't know for sure what happened, but his Linked-in suggested that he was
hired by the government of Egypt. (Mind you, this was 2009) It must have been
very important.

~~~
kev009
That is IBM i, aka OS/400, a completely different beast than s390. It's one of
the most underappreciated and misunderstood examples of systems software in
the industry. It's survived four distinct CPU changes of the same magnitude as
Apple m68k->ppc->ppc64->ix32->ix64, except retaining full compatibility back
to the original (and even further back to System/3x). Because everything above
the analogue of the syscall layer is machine independent code, you get new
benefits with even minor hardware ISA upgrades for existing code without
rebuilding. This is all basically "free" for the user without any thought or
downside. IBM was also doing ahead of time Java compilation to MI for ~15
years. IIRC this was one of the fastest platforms for JVM apps for many years.

The closest equivalent outside OS/400 would be like using LLVM IR for the
entire system. But the memory model is also very elegant, the Single Level
Store allows for storage tiering without the kind of block layer hiding that
most solutions use.. closest equivalent is ZFS with a L2ARC in the POSIX
world.

The lessons learned from the machine dependent part of IBM i were used to
build the pHyp hypervisor in POWER4+. This is a firmware level microkernel and
very interesting in its own right.

This isn't to say you should go out and port everything to IBM i, just that it
should be studied by any serious OS developer and academic. While there is a
good book on the design by Frank Soltis, the chief architect, it does not go
into anywhere near the depth that UNIX design books did even when covering the
proprietary versions. I wish I could learn a lot more about it.

~~~
cartoonfoxes
It's such a damn shame that IBM makes all of this stuff utterly inaccessible
to the developer, hobbyist, and academic crowds.

In the past few years I've taken an interest in big-iron systems, and I've
recently started spending time with OpenVMS in preparation for release of the
x64 port. I spent a lot of time digging into System i, and z/OS, but my
efforts were constantly frustrated by the inability to get my hands on real
software and/or hardware, or even paid time on a machine.

Shoutout for the OpenVMS hobbyist program. Anyone interested in obscure
commercial OS's with serious pedigree should give it a look. HPE's OpenVMS
documentation portal is well laid out and straightforward - all the
information is there.

~~~
fiddlerwoaroof
There is [http://pub400.com](http://pub400.com) which'll give you free
terminal access onto an IBM iSeries

------
johnl314
I have an old PowerBook (from about 2005, not long before Apple's intel
switch) that still runs fine, after replacing RAM a couple times. I use it as
my back-up computer at the office to this day, sometimes bring it to the
coffee shop to outhip the hipsters. It's been running the Debian PPC port for
many years without much trouble.

Of course this does not come as a big surprise; I'll just keep running the
most recent version until the hard drive dies and my current laptop becomes
the back-up.

Are there any distros still standing with PPC support? I used to run Ubuntu,
but it was dropped years ago.

~~~
TheGorramBatman
Its not linux, but NetBSD still has its macppc port. And Gentoo.

~~~
astrodust
Looks like Yellowdog Linux is discontinued, but at the time it was great:
[http://www.fixstars.com/en/technologies/linux/](http://www.fixstars.com/en/technologies/linux/)

One of the best features of that distribution was none of the standard pre-
compiled root-kits would run on it, plus all the buffer-overflow attacks had
to be customized for PowerPC, something few script kiddies had the capability
of doing. It made for a surprisingly resilient system at the time.

------
patrickg_zill
While it may be petty to say, I think it is accurate to point out that this
sort of news tends to lead people to focus on the "winning" commodity
architectures, in this case x64 and ARM, and minimize the use of other
architectures.

If I were starting a business today, you'd have to give me free hardware that
used POWER or SPARC cpu in order to persuade me to use it. The last thing I
want is to have to switch hardware platforms; and thus x64 and ARM are the
safe choices.

~~~
chc
You've kind of got the cart before the horse. People already minimize the use
of PowerPC, and that's why Debian is dropping it.

------
user5994461
Is there any popular hardware that is PowerPC?

~~~
pmarin
Not popular but all "modern" hardware for AmigaOS is PowerPc based.

[http://www.amigaos.net/content/72/supported-
hardware](http://www.amigaos.net/content/72/supported-hardware)

[http://www.acube-systems.biz/index.php?page=hardware](http://www.acube-
systems.biz/index.php?page=hardware)

~~~
tw04
Those are 64-bit ppc CPUs, not the 32-bit that ppc references.

~~~
pmarin
None of them are POWER8, the minimum to run Debian ppc64el[1]

[1]
[https://wiki.debian.org/ppc64el#Required_Hardware](https://wiki.debian.org/ppc64el#Required_Hardware)

------
dmh2000
most of this thread is concerned with the desktop. but powerpc is widely used
in the automotive systems. Those systems are running either some form of
Linux, an RTOS or a bareboard exec. The modern powerpc SOC's are available in
very wide temperature ranges (-40..+125) which makes them attractive for
automotive. The QorIQ ppc's are used in networking also.

~~~
planteen
The Linux kernel still has support. Running Debian is no longer an option, but
I doubt many embedded systems were doing that anyway. Most probably were
running some Yocto image from the SoC vendor. So it just means cross compiling
from source now.

------
kakwa_
crap.

Since jessie, I could not maintain my old Sparc V100 server.

Now it's my PowerBook G3 Pismo :(

(to be true, it wasn't very usable anymore, 45 seconds 100% CPU to load the
main gmail page just to give an idea).

------
unethical_ban
More detail on why would have been interesting. Especially with other lesser
known architectures still supported.

~~~
icebraining
No (credible) volunteers to manage the port, it seems: [http://www.mail-
archive.com/debian-powerpc@lists.debian.org/...](http://www.mail-
archive.com/debian-powerpc@lists.debian.org/msg65880.html)

~~~
jcurbo
I didn't go look but that was going to be my guess. Since Debian is volunteer-
ran, each architecture needs people to manage it, as well as having adequate
hardware to test/build on.

------
stretchwithme
Excellent name. :-)

------
sctb
We've updated the title from “Debian drops support for PowerPC”, which breaks
the guidelines by being editorialized.

~~~
cgvgffyv
It may well have been, but the title as it stands now is useless. I was forced
to click through and read all the comments to find out what this was about.

~~~
sctb
The title “Release Architectures for Debian 9 'Stretch'” is precisely
accurate; it's what the linked article _is_ and was titled that way by the
author for a reason. On the other hand, because the article states that the
removal of PowerPC is the only change from Jessie we've reverted the title to
something that expresses this.

