Gentoo/Linux on the PowerPC Architecture

Luca Barbato <lu_zero@gentoo.org>

Lars Weiler <pylon@gentoo.org>

Gentoo Foundation

FOSDEM – Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

Brusseles

February 27, 2005

Content

Introduction to the PowerPC Architecture

Comparision to Gentoo on x86

Software troubles

Development team

Succeded experimental work

Future

Introduction to the PowerPC Architecture

Performance optimized with enhanced RISC Performance Chip

Consortium of Apple, IBM and Motorola (Freescale)

Started in 1991

32-bit and 64-bit

Big-Endian but also Little-Endian capable

AltiVec vectorunit

Systems that use PPC

Apple-Macintosh computers

IBM RS/6000, iSeries

Motorola PowerStack RISC PCs

Nintendo GameCube, Xbox 2

Embedded systems

Amiga, AmigaOne

DBox 2

Supported PPCs by Gentoo

All NewWorld Apple-Macintosh:

G3

G4 (with AltiVec)

G5 (in 32-bit-mode – in 64-bit-mode it's Gentoo/PPC64)

Genesi's Pegasos (I and II)

Some few OldWorld Apple-Macintosh

Probably RS/6000

Comparision to Gentoo on x86

Installation

Toolchain

Kernel

Boot-Loader

Special packages

Installation

The steps are roughly the same

Partition layout is different

Macintosh partition table or Amiga table

800k-bootstrap-partition

Toolchain

Switched to gcc-3.4 as first arch in Gentoo in summer 2004

gcc-3.3 caused too many problems on PowerPC

The move caused to end OldWorld support officially

Based on a well tested glibc and binutils

Kernel

2.6 kernel without special patches

Configuration looks like on x86

Quite everything works, no major endianess-problems are known

Bzip2 packed kernels are unuseable

Boot-Loader

YaBoot for NewWorld

800k-bootstrap-partition

Reads quite every file-system

BootX for OldWorld

Needs Mac OS 7/8/9 for booting

Forth Bootmenu for the Pegasos

Easier than handling files on the partition

Future: grub2 ?

Special Packages

Mostly for Power-Management on Apple Mobile Devices:

pbbuttonsd with powerprefs and gtkpbbuttons

pmud

Mac-on-Linux (MoL)

Software troubles

Missing support for:

Java Browser Plugin

Flash

Video Codecs

All that depends on Windows libraries

Some software is not endianess-aware – they compile, but they break on runtime (audio applications)

Development team

About 25 Developers with a PPC box

The sponsorship of 13 Genesi Pegasos machines brought us some new Devs

The core team is located in Europe and the United States

First-time porters are still team members

Up to date in comparision with x86

Operational tasks of the project

Testing and stabelising packages

Take care for GLSA

Bug-hunting

Co-work with release engineering for a release

Co-work with the documentation team

Being up to date in general Gentoo evolution

Succeded experimental work

X enabled LiveCDs

CUBE GameCD for the Pegasos

First Linux running on a Mini Mac was Gentoo (out of the box)

Cross-development LiveCD for Linux and Mac OS X

Future

Deluxe XliveDVD

OldWorld support back in 2005.1

Better RS/6000 support

More GameCDs for more PowerPCs

Binhost with binary packages for download

http://ppc.gentoo.org/

Larry the cow

Thank
you for your
attention!

Lars Weiler

2005-02-24T21:03:24