ppc64le and 32-bit LE userland compatibility

[Daniel Kolesa]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2020, at 16:23, Michal Suchánek wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 02, 2020 at 01:40:23PM +0000, Joseph Myers wrote:
> > On Tue, 2 Jun 2020, Daniel Kolesa wrote:
> > 
> > > not be limited to being just userspace under ppc64le, but should be 
> > > runnable on a native kernel as well, which should not be limited to any 
> > > particular baseline other than just PowerPC.
> > 
> > This is a fairly unusual approach to bringing up a new ABI.  Since new 
> > ABIs are more likely to be used on new systems rather than switching ABI 
> > on an existing installation, and since it can take quite some time for all 
> > the software support for a new ABI to become widely available in 
> > distributions, people developing new ABIs are likely to think about what 
> > new systems are going to be relevant in a few years' time when working out 
> > the minimum hardware requirements for the new ABI.  (The POWER8 minimum 
> > for powerpc64le fits in with that, for example.)
> That means that you cannot run ppc64le on FSL embedded CPUs (which lack
> the vector instructions in LE mode). Which may be fine with you but
> other people may want to support these. Can't really say if that's good
> idea or not but I don't foresee them going away in a few years, either.

well, ppc64le already cannot be run on those, as far as I know (I don't think it's possible to build ppc64le userland without VSX in any configuration)

> 
> Thanks
> 
> Michal
>

Daniel