(splitting up answers again...)

Roland Clobus <[email protected]> writes:

>> I would like to add riscv64 and ppc64el support.  I saw a riscv64 merge
>> request.  What is the status on adding that?
>
> At DebConf25 in Brest I got the impression that RISC-V hardware is
> unfortunately currently not powerful enough to run a full-blown
> desktop environment (I might be wrong).

I have some HiFive Premier P550 machines running Ubuntu, and it came up
with GNOME when I got it, and was fairly usable from what I could tell.

> I haven't heard about ppc64el support yet; would that kind of hardware
> be suitable to running a desktop environment like GNOME?

I have some Raptor Talos II machines from https://raptorcs.com/ and even
the less performant Blackbird seems to be used as a GNOME desktop,
although I mostly use them in text mode.

https://www.talospace.com/2024/11/fedora-41-mini-review-on-blackbird-and.html
https://www.talospace.com/2025/08/debian-13-trixie.html

>> Would sponsoring you with riscv64/ppc64el OpenQA hardware make this
>> easier?  I could setup a VM and give a SSH root key, but alas I do not
>> know anything about OpenQA.
>
> Only if that hardware is actually running natively, not using
> e.g. qemu-system-PLATFORM to emulate the hardware, as emulation will
> be terribly slow.
> Such hardware needs to be pretty powerful, since building live images
> is rather I/O intensive, whereas doing functionality tests with openQA
> is rather memory intensive.

I think the Talos II could handle that, I have one host with 18 cores,
128GB and NVME available for experimentation.  It would have to be in a
VM though, since I use the machine for other things to (e.g., it is a
Guix ppc64el build server) but the VM is accelerated.

Is access to hardware a limitor for arm64 too?  I have Supermicro
ARS-110M-NR with a 128 core Ampere Altra Max, although performant arm64
hardware is readily available at many VPS hosting sites (e.g., Hetzner)
cheaply which is probably easier to access.

/Simon

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