I don’t think its a porting problem but package availability. For example, fedora ships ppc64le and that means their DNF repos are providing for most if not all packages on the amd64 distro. But lets say you rebuild it to big endian and you want to install vim. There won’t be any packages right?
Having said that there are distros like void that offers both endianess and you can always switch to something like Gentoo and bootstrap from stage1. You’ll be compiling pretty much you use and probably submitting a ton of issues since you are using something nobody can test. It’s expensive as fuck.
Could work if your ~autis~… I mean dedication and patience to build everything you use and you settle for basic stuff.
By the way UNICAMP had a program where they would allow anyone to use their POWER8 machine for a few weeks. Sadly it is closed now.
I see POWER as a big failure specially from IBM. If you compare their solutions there will always be something cheaper and more powerful. Even back in the early 2000s Apple was selling better machines running the same architecture.
If you are interested I recommend watching this video of NCommander from Soylent News hacking his way through the AIX source code to run Doom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzhCGSE7KKw
I hope RISC-V can scratch my itch for an open risc architecture.
No replies yet.
