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On Fri, March 18, 20UTC until 22UTC the ppc-team had a meeting about those |
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topics: |
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1) project management elections |
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2) future goals |
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3) AltiVec in portage |
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4) QEMU ABI wrapper |
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5) Kernel issues |
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6) LiveCD |
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7) ppc64 and ppc merger |
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This is a summary of the topics: |
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1) project management elections |
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There should be lead-elections every six months, say after a release, or when |
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it is needed. You can volunteer for the Operational or Strategical Lead (or |
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both). You have to write your plans and tell them to the team. Then a voting |
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will take place via email. You can vote for one or several candidates. If |
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there are two with the same ammount of votes, there will be a further election |
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between those two. If you ran for both Operational and Strategical Lead you |
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need to declare which one is your first choice. |
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2) future goals |
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Instead of project goals posted with the beginning of a year, the ppc team |
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want to release quarterly updates about the goals. An example of those could |
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be found at the Gentoo Documentation Project. The Strategical Lead has to |
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track the goals and is responsible for their publication. |
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The current goals for 2005.0 are: |
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- OldWorld Support for 2005.0 |
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- XLiveDVD for ppc |
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- Support of more machines |
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- compatibility list of PowerPCs with Gentoo running |
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- merge pegasos-sources into gentoo-(dev-)sources |
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- (better) support for CHRP/PReP |
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- support the installer |
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- better AltiVec support |
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And the all-time goals are: |
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- stable portage-tree |
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- minimized buglist |
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- at least two releases in a year |
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- having a nice time in the team :) |
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To keep a minimized buglist we want to introduce ppc-bugdays again. They |
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should take place monthly or even more often when it's needed. Best for devs |
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would be around Saturday afternoon (depending on their timezone). |
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The next ppc-bugday is on the same day like the usual bugday: April 2. To |
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find good users who may become a dev, we will talk about the bugs in |
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#gentoo-ppc. |
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3) AltiVec in portage |
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Some poitns about AltiVec: |
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1. gcc-4 will have an autovectorizer |
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2. the linux kernel will have an improved AltiVec support (avoiding vrsave on |
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non AltiVec tasks) |
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3. AltiVec abi for non AltiVec code is relatively slow |
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And there are two plans to resolve the problems: |
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1. keep wide AltiVec support and suggest to use -mabi=altivec everywhere and |
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maybe use the autovectorizer |
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2. restrict altivec to the AltiVec enable packages and make the others use the |
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non-AltiVec abi (which includes work on proper flag-o-matic support) |
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3. work on an AltiVec enabled glibc |
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We decided to work on 2 and 3. |
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4) QEMU ABI wrapper |
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qemu is nice. lu_zero wants to a binfmt hack, so that we can run |
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non-ppc-applications on ppc. But he can't do that alone and so he is |
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searching for other devs. It's a nice attempt, but we have higher prioritated |
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situations to solve. |
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5) Kernel issues |
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We found out recently, that the 2.6.11-kernel produce several problems on ppc. |
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At least three could be named: |
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- RTC/hwclock hickups on several machines |
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- linker problems with special kernel configs (a guess might be the highmem |
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support) |
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- compile-problems on G5 32bit |
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These made us to use a 2.6.10-kernel with 2.6.11-patches backported for the |
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release. In the long term the G5 32bit-kernel support will vanish, so that we |
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only support ppc32 on 32-bit-machines. |
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6) LiveCD |
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The release's LiveCD is about to be finished. Currently only the kernel |
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causes problems, as not all patches has been commited to CVS (nb: at time of |
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writing the summary this isn't an issue any more). G3G4-support works well, |
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and the G5 has also been tested on two machines. The Pegasos-kernel causes |
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some headaches, but there is at least one compiled kernel which can boot quite |
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properly. Stages has been tested quite well, GRP not, but that isn't such an |
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issue. |
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Thanks go to all supporters for this release! |
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7) ppc64 and ppc |
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With the dwindling support for the 32-bit G5 kernel becoming more apparent and |
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the 64-bit kernel support under rapid development tgall and dostrow would |
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like to propose a partial merger of the ppc and ppc64 teams for the following |
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purposes: all ppc64 hardware is able to run with 3 different userlands, a |
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pure 64-bit environment as we have now, a 64-bit kernel with a 32-bit |
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userland, which is very easy to create, and a multilib environment, which as |
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soon as dostrow gets finished, making hardened work on ppc64. Two of the |
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three of these configs allow regular 32-bit ppc binaries to run on the system |
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and the ppc64 team lacks the manpower to handle troubleshooting both 64 and 32 |
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bit issues. |
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There was no objection during the meeting from noone of the attendees by the |
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ppc and ppc64 team. |
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That means, we will work an a common-profile with sub-profiles for ppc and |
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ppc64. A first target-date would be the 2005.1 release. The masterplan[tm] |
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for the team-merge should be presented at the next meeting (in about four |
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weeks). |
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