Alternate architecture support?

helloSystem / ISO

helloSystem Live and installation ISO

https://github.com/helloSystem/

BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License

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Alternate architecture support? #126

Closed shawnanastasio closed 3 years ago

shawnanastasio commented 3 years ago

Hello,

I was wondering if there are any plans to support alternate architectures supported by upstream FreeBSD in the helloSystem build infrastructure. Mainly I'm looking at arm64 and ppc64{,le}.

probonopd commented 3 years ago

hello @shawnanastasio

We are definitely interested in adding architectures, particularly

aarch64 (= "arm64") for systems like Pinebook Pro and others
i386 (if we can reduce the required RAM footprint from currently 4 down to 2 GB which is more typical of such systems)

We have not been interested in PowerPC, particularly because no attractive new mainstream machines are available for this architecture, and affordable used Intel ones are easy to come by. What would be the reason to want PowerPC in 2021, besides mere nostalgia?

shawnanastasio commented 3 years ago

ppc64le is (PowerPC64 Little Endian) actually a relatively new architecture used by modern IBM POWER hardware, such as RaptorCS' Talos II and Blackbird machines (https://www.raptorcs.com/). In fact, I'm typing this on a Talos II with POWER9, and it's the most powerful computer in my house (vastly outperforms my x86_64 machines).

Retro PPC hardware isn't compatible with ppc64le, so compatibility with those machines wasn't what I had in mind. These days most (all?) mainstream Linux distributions support ppc64le long after dropping support for retro PPC (ppc32, ppc64). FreeBSD also gained ppc64le support recently in 13, though it has supported ppc32 and 64 for much longer.

In any case, I'm glad to hear that there are plans to support aarch64. Hopefully portability to other architectures supported by upstream FreeBSD will become easier as well as the infrastructure around multi-arch builds becomes more mature.

probonopd commented 3 years ago

Thanks @shawnanastasio I wasn't aware that there were non-Mac PowerPC machines available to "normal users". Looking at the Raptor prices which are higher than typical amd64 machines, I think they are out of reach for most of the intended target audience of helloSystem (and myself). aarch64 is a different story - I expect those to become very affordable in the future.

shawnanastasio commented 3 years ago

Yes, that's a very fair point - even Raptor's cheapest Blackbird systems go for ~1.7k which is still quite far off from typical amd64 systems. I wouldn't expect upstream to take on any maintenance burden for machines that expensive, but I'm curious to hear if you would consider supporting it on a best-effort basis by accepting third-party support patches?

Note that I'm not currently in a position to contribute a large amount of time to maintaining anything, but it would be helpful to know your position on something like that.

probonopd commented 3 years ago

We are building on infrastructure provided by https://cirrus-ci.com/, and I doubt that they have ppc64/le instances, so it would require someone to do local builds on local machines. That someone cannot be me since I don't have the hardware nor want to run a server farm. But we'd definitely accept the occasional patch if it doesn't break anything and doesn't add much extra burden.

shawnanastasio commented 3 years ago

Sounds entirely reasonable, thanks!