Talos II POWER9 System, Funtoo, and Developing on ppc64

[siris]

With the recent Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, Intel's Management Engine (ME), and AMD's Platform Secure Processor (PSP), Raptor Computing Systems Talos II POWER9 system (should be releasing soon) is looking very interesting in contrast to the x86_64 platform.

As a long time Gentoo and now full-time Funtoo user, I am really interested in the prospect of running Funtoo Linux on this POWER9 hardware.

Last time I used a PPC64 stage (Gentoo) was years ago on PowerPC 970FX inside a PowerMac G5 and the support for different ebuilds was minimal at best.

My question is when these consumer POWER9 systems are released by RCS, what is the feasibility of getting Funtoo to support a ppc64 stage3 build and ebuilds?

Also, if anyone has used ppc64 recently, how is the package support and overall development?

I would love to get a discussion going around the development on the new POWER9 platform and what the effort would be to make it supported Funtoo platform.

[Oleg Vinichenko]

Hiya!

Having no dedicated stages is indeed because of hardware lack. It is possible to convert the gentoo ppc64 stages into funtoo stages with some efforts, it could be challenging task, though.

[raptillamajor]

If you develop for OpenPOWER, I'm wondering if ppc64le development can be encouraged over ppc64, because most linux distros use ppc64le. Specifically, if there's any issue with cloud platform compatibility then I'll be remorseful.

Edited February 12, 2021 by raptillamajor