[Openmcl-devel] ppc port future

[R. Matthew Emerson]

I mentioned a couple of months ago that we were thinking about
dropping support for Mac OS X on PowerPC.  We've decided to do
that.  So, starting with the upcoming 1.7 release, CCL will no
longer support PowerPC systems running Mac OS X.

(Of course, you can pay Clozure to do pretty much anything
whatever with CCL, including maintain Mac OS X/ppc support.
But the responses to my message a month ago were of the
variety "Oh well, it's been a long time coming, what can
you do?" rather than "Oh no!  You can't do that!")

On the other hand, we want to keep the PowerPC port alive.  We're
planning to contiune to support PowerPC systems running Linux, in
both 32- and 64-bit versions.  Unfortunately, PowerPC-based Apple
hardware (which is the hardware that has been commonly available
and relatively inexpensive) is starting to die off.

So, if there are organizations or users out there with an
interest in seeing CCL continue to run on PowerPC hardware,
perhaps you would consider

  * letting us know that ppc support is of interest to you

  * providing access to linux/ppc systems (say via a virtual
    machine) that we can use for building and testing CCL.

One issue that will probably need to be addressed if CCL is to run
on larger, high-end systems is that of page size.  CCL assumes
that the page size is 4K; a page size of 64K is sometimes used on
these larger systems.  CCL would need to be modified to work on
such systems, and this will take some effort.