About 2.5 years ago I added AArch64 (64-bit ARM) architecture support to
Kolla project. Side effect of that work was adding ppc64le (64-bit
Power, Little Endian) support.
Time passed, from time to time someone jumped to the irc channel and
said that they use it. No one in core team spent much time on supporting
it as it was outside of our interest.
>From time to time I was reserving Power machine in Red Hat to do build
and check how we are with ppc64le support. This week I did that again.
>From 3 distributions we target only Debian/source combo was buildable.
CentOS builds lack 'rabbitmq' 3.7.10 (we use external repo) and
'gnocchi' binary images are not buildable due to lack of some packages
(issue already reported to CentOS by TripleO team).
Ubuntu builds lack MariaDB 10.3 because upstream repo is broken.
Packages index is provided for 'ppc64le' but no packages so we get 404
errors.
Due to all those issues and fact that there are no users of ppc64le
Kolla containers I want to drop support for it in this cycle. Any
objections?
I think TripleO uses the ppc64le containers. I'm unsure if we're relying on anything special to build them however. I know there's been some effort to get a pp64le upstream build system going. ccing Wes as he might have the status on this.
The TripleO team is working on ppc64le right now and should be uploading ppc64le containers to
docker.io in a few weeks. I'm pretty sure the ppc team is using kolla to build the containers, but I'm not 100% sure as the ppc64le container build jobs are in a 3rd party ci system.
I'm checking with some folks to get the details that would be helpful here.
Thanks.