Fedora Xen PPC integration report 2/20

From: Jerone Young <jyoung5@us.ibm.com>
To: xen-devel <xen-devel@lists.xensource.com>
Cc: Jimi Xenidis <jimix@watson.ibm.com>,
	Hollis Blanchard <hollisb@us.ibm.com>
Subject: Fedora Xen PPC integration report 2/20
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:58:06 -0600	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1172008687.22591.48.camel@thinkpad> (raw)

I'll go through some of what is going on. Our break down of packages can
be found here:
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenPPC/Fedora?highlight=%28Fedora%29

Fedora Community (PPC)
=====================
IRC -- best place
~~~
server: irc.feenode.net (freenode)
channel: #fedora-ppc

Mailing List
~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ppc
This list is not very active

Fedora Core 7
=============
Currently PPC rawhide builds of Fedora core 7 have a lot of know issues
(as I found out in IRC). Apparently there is a lot of work happening to
the builds at the moment so FC7test3 MAY be a reliable build for PPC.
Due to these problems I have been unable to create an environment to get
Xen up and going under FC7 to see what may/may not be wrong with
userspace tools. I am prodding people now!

One sticking point that noone seems to be able to answer yet. Is does
Fedora work on IBM System P systems. It looks to work for System I, but 

Feature freeze
--------------
Has been moved back to March 19

Release date
------------
The release date has been moved to May 24th. They are going to attempt
to rework the build system so the Fedora Core & Fedora Extras are
combined to form Voltron!
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/7/Schedule

kernel
-------
So options CONFIG_PPC_MULTIPLATFORM (Jimi you called it
CONFIG_PPC_GENERIC) is enabled. Which will allow for kernel integration.

The Fedora PPC kernel maintainer is David Woodhouse
<dwmw2@infradead.org>

He is more then happy to take in need changes if we can get them in and
they don't break anything.

Installer (anaconda)
--------------------
The installer is unable to create  "Prep" partitions which are used by
IBM PPC machines to load up the boot loader (as opposed to the Master
Boot Record everyone else uses). I've filed a bug on this:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=229231

IBM PPC Systems
---------------
While it's supposed to work. I have yet to see this work with Global
Firmware.  

Fedora 7 Extras
===============
grub2
------
In this space I started the prep work by packaging up grub2 for
fedora-extras with fixes as suggested by Jermy Katz. The problem is no
one has gotten to it. I have emailed the list today probing to see if
someone would hurry up and review it and throw it in. The bugzilla for
the review can be found here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=228255

More info as it comes but this is where things stand as of today. 