Fedora Is Beginning To Spin Workstation & Live Images For POWER

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Is Beginning To Spin Workstation & Live Images For POWER

If you are running the likes of the Raptor Blackbird for a POWER open-source desktop and wanting to run Fedora on it, currently you need to use the Fedora "server" CLI installer and from there install the desired packages for a desktop. But moving forward, Fedora is beginning to spin Workstation and Live images for PPC64LE...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-Workstation-Live-PPC64LE

[darkbasic]

That's a very good news! I noticed that Fedora doesn't package spice for ppc64le, do you know what's preventing Spice from working on such architecture? Not being able to use it is a virtualization nightmare: no USB redirection, no QXL...

[hiryu]

Awesome news if you're into POWER on a desktop/workstation! Even if you don't use Fedora (I don't), more active desktop development will eventually see better support and more fixes trickle down to the other distributions. I suppose this is one way that the IBM acquisition of RedHat is paying off.

[edwaleni]

That's a very good news! I noticed that Fedora doesn't package spice for ppc64le, do you know what's preventing Spice from working on such architecture? Not being able to use it is a virtualization nightmare: no USB redirection, no QXL...

Per Spice:

• the client can run on x86, x86_64 and arm architectures.
• the server does only work on little-endian architectures, and has mainly been tested on x86-64.

OS-X is listed as experimental.


There is a GTK based Spice widget for PPC that was developed for Fedora located at:

https://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/fedora/28/ppc64/s/spice-gtk3-0.34-4.fc28.ppc64.html

But it appears Spice has taken down some of the pages as I get 404's for all of them.

Looks like CentOS was working with Spice PPC64 as late as Fall of 2018.

https://buildlogs.centos.org/c7.1804.u.ppc64/spice/

There is a whole bugzilla thread out there trying to get spice-graphics to work correctly.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1563418

Mysterious that a lot of work suddenly ended by Fall of 2018.

Many of the issues I read were that the many bundles of Qemu in the Linux builds did not have multi-arch support so the clients were getting black screens.

Hope that helps.

[darkbasic]

[*]the server does only work on little-endian architectures, and has mainly been tested on x86-64.

That's what I've read as well, but for some reason there is no sign of spice server even on little endian ppc64.
What's even more strange is that I've found some people trying to get it working on BE ppc64 but none on LE.

[AdamW]

hiryu we've actually been collaborating with Power folks for much longer, from long before the IBM acquisition. We've already been testing Fedora on ppc64 for years:

https://openqa.stg.fedoraproject.org/group_overview/3

what's changed here is only the introduction of pre-built desktop images (you could already install on Power and deploy a desktop via the network installer or after deployment, this just makes it easier).

[madscientist159]

This is great! While it's been possible to install the workstation version by going through the server version for a while, we've really been missing the desktop ISOs. Fedora/RHEL are taking the lead here, wonder if other distros will follow?