[RFC] Drop Non-smp PowerPC Kernel Flavor

[Leann Ogasawara]

On Wed, 2012-03-14 at 11:59 -0500, Micah Gersten wrote:
> On 03/14/2012 11:52 AM, Leann Ogasawara wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > The Ubuntu Kernel Team has been evaluating some of the current
> > maintenance burdens for the upcoming Precise Pangolin 12.04 LTS release.
> > One area which would reduce the maintenance costs would be to drop the
> > non-smp PowerPC kernel flavor.  There are currently three PowerPC
> > flavors:
> >
> >  * non-smp (linux-image-powerpc)
> >  * smp (linux-image-powerpc-smp)
> >  * smp-64 (linux-image-powerpc64-smp)
> >
> > Even though PowerPC is a community maintained port [1], the PowerPC
> > kernels are still generated along side the officially supported distro
> > kernels.  Taking that into consideration, every PowerPC flavor takes
> > ~2hrs to build, ie. ~6hrs for all three flavors.  Given the number of
> > official builds and test builds that are performed over the life of the
> > LTS, this equates to a significant amount of time.
> >
> > We would thus like to propose dropping the non-smp PowerPC kernel
> > flavor.  Doing so would also require the installer to be updated, hence
> > CC'ing Colin Watson.  We'd like to drop this as soon as possible, in
> > time for Beta-2 would be ideal.
> >
> > Thoughts?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Leann Ogasawara
> >
> > [1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2007-February/000098.html
> >
> >
> What's the impact on supported PowerPC hardware?

Jeremy Kerr did some testing a while back and noted that the PowerPC smp
flavor should run on non-smp hardware, but did acknowledge there could
be a slight performance degradation.  Jeremy, do you still have the data
available?

Thanks,
Leann