The goal of this page is to collect the information necessary to demonstrate that the powerpc architecture meets the architecture recertification criteria for etch.
Availability: The architecture needs to be available for everybody, i.e. it must be available without NDAs and it must be possible to buy machines on the market.
PowerPC and POWER hardware is available new from a number of manufacturers, including Apple (http://www.apple.com/hardware/), Genesi (http://www.genesippc.com), IBM (http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/linux/ for example) and Mercury Computer Systems (http://www.mc.com/products/systems.aspx).
- Developers availability: The architecture must have a developer-available (i.e. debian.org) machine that contains the usual development chroots (at least stable, testing, unstable). bruckner.debian.org has developer-available chroots. There are two 4-way SMT Power5 boxes available at the Augsbourg university for Debian usage, not official since even if IBM thinks they were donated to Debian, debian-admin wanted to have nothing to do with it. Genesi donated many boxes to Debian developers (20-30 I think), and more may come in the future.
- Users: The architecture needs to prove that developers and users are actually using it. Five Developers need to certify in that they're actively developing on this architecture, and it needs to be demonstrated that at least 50 users are using the platform.
- Developers
Name
Login
Roger Leigh
rleigh
Alexander Wirt
formorer
Michel Daenzer
daenzer
Sven Luther
svenl
cjwatson
broonie
alfie
- Users
- popcon reports 116 reporting hosts.
debian-powerpc@l.d.o has 870 subscribers. Genesi sells and supports Pegasos machines with Debian preinstalled on it. debian-edu powerpc port.
- popcon reports 116 reporting hosts.
- Developers
- Installer: The architecture must have a working, tested installer.
- debian-installer works
- Porters and Upstream support: There is support by the porters and upstream. This is especially true for the toolchain and the kernel.
- Archive coverage: The architecture needs to have successfully compiled the current version of the overwhelming part of the archive, excluding architecture-specific packages.
97.35% compiled (http://buildd.debian.org/stats/powerpc.txt), but typically around 98% (there has been a slight drop over the last 10 days)
- Archive cleanliness: All binary packages need to be built from unmodified sources (i.e. from the source found in the ftp archive), and all binary packages need to be built by Debian developers.
- This is true.
- Autobuilder support: The architecture is able to keep up with unstable with not more than two buildds, has redundancy in the autobuilder network, keeps their autobuilders running for 24x7, has autobuilders acceptable for security support.
- voltaire.debian.org is able to keep up with unstable. malo.debian.org is able to keep up with unstable. Genesi is ready to sponsor machines if ever the need arises.
- Veto powers: Security team, system administrators and release team must not veto inclusion.