Hello Kurt, On Tue, 2025-02-25 at 02:49 +0000, Kurt Stine wrote: > 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 very > 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.
I think it would be more reasonable to work on the kernel and glibc such that rebuilding all packages with a patched compiler should not be necessary. Given the very low user base, I don't think it would be justified to bootstrap a completely new Debian port for the Wii U. > 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 hardware isn't really the issue but the amount of work needed to maintain such a port. Such an endeavor would only be justified if the number of users is high enough. > The smp patches are available here: https://gitlab.com/linux-wiiu/smp-patches Wouldn't it be possible to upstream these? And do we really need to rebuild all packages to make use of all cores of the Wii U CPU? > 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! If there is really no way other than rebuilding all packages, I would suggest using a source-based distribution such as Gentoo. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
