On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 6:18 PM, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowl...@kev009.com> wrote:
> This is an unfortunate attitude many people have in free software > these days, especially big business contributors with profit-aligned > motives. Linus weighs in on a similar dissent here: > http://lwn.net/Articles/339455/. This is just rude and self-serving and an inappropriate personal attack. If I don't do what you want, I must be some evil slave of corporate capitalism? And argument by authority referencing Linus's opinion is fallacious reasoning. > I'm currently working on the NetBSD port: > http://www.netbsd.org/ports/rs6000/. I also have patches that boot > the Linux kernel. Quite simply, this stuff is interesting to me. I > am not a professional systems programmer. This project has a low bar > of entry and serves a pedagogic purpose to me. I can't compete with > professional arch maintainers that handle the lower level on modern > hardware, nor do I have a POWER7 to call my own. Again, this is a totally specious argument. You don't have access to POWER7, so you must use a RIOS2 system? You cannot use any of the other, low-cost PowerPC development systems that were produced in the interim? I also ported and booted Open Source OSes on RIOS RS/6000 systems. It was not pretty. The I/O space is a mess. > Finally, the CPU is used in a variety of embedded applications. There > are over 200 RSC(POWER1) RAD6000 in space [1], including a launch in > Feb 2010. While compiler choice in this application is almost > certainly static, GCC support provides interesting options for these > folks since you can't beam up a Core i7 just because it's fashionable. I am well aware of the RAD6000. As the Wikipedia article mentions, it was superceded by the RAD750 based on the PowerPC 750 processor. As any professional software used in spaceflight and satellites is locked down years in advance, I doubt that modern GCC support for RAD6000 would be useful. And by the time they upgrade to GCC 4.6, they will be using RAD750 or its successor. > > Regards, > Kevin Bowling > > [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RAD6000 >
