[gentoo-dev] 2006/03/05 PPC Meeting Log and Minutes

[Chris White]

2006/03/05 PPC Meeting Minutes

The meeting lasted about 1 hour 30 minutes, with 5 items on the agenda. GCC 
4.1 was moved to the front of the agenda, as discussions were taking place 
regarding it previous to the meeting.  The new agenda layout was as follows:

1) GCC 4.1
2) The 2006.0 Release
3) Leadership
4) Genesi/Freescale/IBM Developer Programs
5) Installer Project PPC Porting

This was followed by an open-floor session.

== Agenda #1: GCC 4.1 ==

Discussions were made regarding gcc 4.1 support for ppc.  This was mainly due 
to the future unmasking of gcc 4.1 into ~arch.  The consensus was that 
dostrow, JoseJX, morfic, and myself had actively been testing ppc and gcc 
4.1.

JoseJX and lu_zero had a few issues with 4.1, but JoseJX's issue found a quick 
resolution, and lu_zero was using a stable only tree.  Due to the use of the 
stable ppc tree for gcc 4.1 testing, this puts us a step ahead in getting 4.1 
ready for stable as well.

Discussion was also made towards enabling nptl and nptlonly as the default in 
future releases.  The old linuxthreads support would not be removed, only 
deprecated towards the now better supported nptl.  Users that wish to utilize 
linuxthreads would be able to do so through a stage 1 install.

== Agenda #2: 2006.0 Release ==

First off was congrats on a great 2006.0 release.  It was said to be better 
than previous ones, and less stress was involved.  Pylon also opened up 
suggestions for 2006.1.  JoseJX proposed using  yaboot for Pegasos II 
machines in the next release.  This is mainly due to it supporting amiga 
partitions, and being able to "just work". 

pvdabeel also noted that Genesi has some beta firmware coming up, which 
included framebuffer support, and that they were accepting ideas for new 
functionality.  One of the ideas mentioned was power-on after power-outage.  

hansmi brought up the need for netboot, which was on the TODO list for both 
ppc (Pylon) and ppc64 (dostrow).

== Agenda #3: Leadership ==

The main discussion here was to find a lead for project meetings.  Many ideas 
were brought up, and SeJo made a suggestion for a mailing list nomination.  
An email was sent out to hansmi on the ppc alias, and voting will begin 
shortly.

Some ideas were also proposed on recruiting, as well as the creation of a 
#gentoo-ppc-dev channel, to isolate dev based discussions.

== Agenda 4: Genesi/Freescale/IBM Developer Programs ==

Talks went on with pvdabeel on the status of developer projects.  The Efika 
project (A PPC based embedded board) was said to start distribution to 
developers on 2006/03/10, when the CPU's arrive from Freescale.

The OSW project was brought up, which is the 64 bit pegasos system in the 
works.  As it is only in the planning stages, not many specifics were given 
about it, but it was mentioned that developers who did not receive the Efika, 
would still be able to apply for the OSW.  

A discussion followed about current Efika setups, and pvdabeel discussed that 
Xorg running with an mpeg2 playing was demonstrated at FTF last june.  Plans 
were also in the way to get XGI cards for the boards, which would provide 
graphics acceleration for the Efika unit.

== Agenda #5: Installer Porting to the PPC ==

agaffney discussed with the status of the porting of the Gentoo Linux 
Installer project to the ppc architecture.  The main problem that seemed to 
be causing an issue was the formating of unused space as a partition on mac 
disk labels.  Another issue was looking at support for IBM based ppc machines 
as well, whose bootloader and partition layout differed from that of MAC or 
Pegasos systems.  The basic plan of support was to handle pegasos 32 bit, 
then mac 32 bit, mac 64 bit, IBM 64 bit, and pegasos 64 bit in around that 
order.  

== Open Floor ==

An open floor discussion followed afterwards, most of it being a continuation 
of the previous agenda notes.

Alright, that should do it.. I hope I didn't miss anything important ;) (I 
probably did :/).

Chris White