On Tue, Feb 25, 2025 at 02:49:32AM +0000, Kurt Stine wrote: > Hello all, > > What would it take to have a debian build for the Espresso (Nintendo Wii U) > CPU? > > Currently, due to overall Espresso weirdness, both GCC and glibc need to be > patched for any applications to take advantage of all three cores. This means > every application and library needs to be patched to be able to support smp > on the Wii U. Debian powerpc will currently run on the Wii U, but due to the > lack of patches, you are stuck with only a single core, and performance is > extremely hampered by that. Adelie Linux currently has support for the Wii U, > but it would be great to have a debian build. > > The Wii U has three cores and 2GB of RAM, so it's relatively powerful machine > for the price (you can find them for around $25 online). I'm also able to > provide access to multiple if needed. > > The smp patches are available here: https://gitlab.com/linux-wiiu/smp-patches > > Currently, there is not a patch for LLVM, so any applications that are built > with clang will not run on an smp-patched build. > > Any input is appreciated!
That looks like it would have a performance impact on all other users. Doing a cache flush on every atomic load and store? So I would think that means distributions would not want to include that in a normal build, so a custom build of anything you wanted to run would be needed. If you had a decently fast powerpc machine you could setup some scripts to rebuild all the packages. It would take a while depending on the speed of the build machine. -- Len Sorensen
