Red Hat To Support PowerPC, AltiVec

Steve Cowan writes "According to an article at MacCentral, Red Hat has announced that they will produce a GNUPro toolchain and cross compiler for AltiVec-enabled PowerPC processors (such as that found in the Power Mac G4). It will be interesting to see just what kind of performance gains this will bring, because many believe that the full potential of AltiVec is far from tapped."

Time to convert all those Mac users ;)

[IamTheRealMike]

Well, maybe. OS X is pretty nice, but that's another story.

Last time my Mac-lover best mate tried Linux the poor quality and performance of Linux PPC ports frustrated him. I pointed out that it's catch-22, having lots of fanatical MacOS users means very few try other operating systems, which means there's little incentive for linux companies to make decent ports and so on.

Problems were really apparent - for instance he tried a distro that was for PPC, but it had no Mac customisations what so ever. It just assumed he was using a 3 button mouse for instance. Hopefully if Red Hat do this properly, rather than just use a fancy compiler, OS X will have some competition on its home ground.

Re:Yellow Dog?

[mfeldstein]

From what I can tell based on the (very short) article, RedHat is *not* porting a full distro to PowerPC. They are porting an Altivec-enabled cross-compiler and something called a GNUPro Linux toolchain. (I'm not sure what the latter is, but I'm sure some other /.er can fill in the details.

At any rate, this is not really a desktop-focused announcement. It's about the embedded market. Moto wants embedded Linux to be developed for use on PPC-backed set-top boxes, Internet appliances, network appliances, etc. It may have some positive repercussions for Unix on PPC desktop as well, but since Apple is already hard at work making the gcc work well for PPC and OS X, I'm not clear on exactly what those benefits might be.

Re:The real worth here...

[Arker]

The real worth here lies in the fact that MacOS X is, let's not forget, essentially a UN*X platform.

I don't see what that has to do with anything. We're talking about porting the toolchain to the hardware. This has nothing to do with MacOs 10 at all. It's about Linux/PPC.

Linux/PPC has been hampered for quite awhile by the lack of good GCC support for things like AltiVec. Performance suffers from lack of optimisation. It sounds like RH is undertaking to fix that. This could be very cool - if they succeed then Linux/PPC programs will be able to take advantage of the full power of the PPC chips. AltiVec doesn't help with everything, far from it, but code which it does help will see truly impressive performance gains.

If you're not clear on what AltiVec [mackido.com] is, try the link out. Basically it's MMX on steroids. It does everything MMX does, better, and some other things besides. It's really very cool tech, and it will be very nice to see Linux/PPC software finally taking advantage of it.

Isn't this just rolling back Apple changes?

[stevek]

IIRC, Apple (perhaps with motorola), has already put all kinds of AltiVec stuff into GCC for use as the OSX system compiler. Apple has been working on their own GCC tree, but has always been feeding some stuff back up to the GCC maintainers.

Isn't this just some marketing hype for RedHat (nee cygnus) just taking the patches already incorporated into Apple's GCC, and putting them into their commercial GCC release?

I don't know how GCC compares to Metrowerks' Compiler, or what Apple is using for different parts of their code (I dunno if MW does OBJ-C, so Apple would likely use GCC at least for that).

I suppose it wouldn't be too hard to look at the binaries and see what they're using.

-SteveK

Probably won't help mac fans.

[Eric Seppanen]

My guess is that they're doing this for embedded applications. Remember that Red Hat does a fair amount of business in the embedded arena, and PowerPC processors are pretty big in embedded applications. So while their work on the compilers will benefit everyone, including people running Linux on their Macs, this doesn't mean you're going to see a PowerPC version of Red Hat Linux any time soon.

Re:Now THAT is a bit of news that makes me smile.

[neuroticia]

Because. They're interesting, even if they're inaccurate. It's the same thing with being interested in how different clothing impacts the speed of skaters. Different skaters will perform better with different suits, and it's wildly inaccurate but you still get some sort of an idea.

I suppose it would be more interesting to take a day or two and try out three competing OSes. Yellowdog [yellowdoglinux.com], OS X [apple.com] and Redhat [redhat.com] and see how they compare with eachother for a variety of different tasks.

I guess I'm interested in it for the same reason I'm interested in trying out different OSes in the first place. Because I'm curious.

-S

Re:It's got a lot to do with OS X

[Arker]

Don't get me wrong, it's great to see Linux able to take advantage of AltiVec. You can deride graphics as "fluff",

And Lord knows I have, often enough. :) But seriously, it has its place, PPC is great hardware for it, and up until now Linux/PPC has been hobbled by not being able to take real advantage of that fact.

However: How many PowerPC boxes are running Linux, and how many are running OS X? And which is a more high-profile market?

*shrug* Who cares?

This still has nothing to do with OS 10. It has to do with Linux/PPC.

I take that back, indirectly it does have a little to do with OS10. Because Mac is using that horrid slow Mach kernel, and still performing as well or better than Linux/PPC, because of better optimisation. RedHat is poised to eliminate that gap, and make Linux/PPC a much more attractive system.

Linux, furthermore, is a "market" that GCC already owns. I know, I know, you can retarget from wherever, but making GCC a viable, and in some senses technically superior, choice for OS X development can only be a good thing. Can you compile Carbon apps w/ GCC? I have no idea, but if not, in eight months you will.

From where on earth are you getting all this?

Re:Good way to make inroads.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you silly! Why doesn't Adobe develop for linux now? Because it's a small community that doesn't run expensive suites of software. Why would this convince Adobe to port when you are talking about an even smaller community of PPC/Linux users?

Re:Time to convert all those Mac users ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I use Linux because I like having locks on my doors and know that the lock version will be updated each time there's a new tool to pick it.

I use Linux because I like the ability to fully choose how my car will run and be able to modify it based on my needs for that day/week/month/year, not have my milage be dependant on what the parent company determines to be the "average" or "optimal". I do not want to have to take out a blowtorch to make modifications.

I use Linux because I want the ability to decide if I want my car to look like this [hwextreme.com] or these [coolcasemods.com] and not have to be limited to the 4 or 5 styles available here [apple.com]. And because I want to be able to fit more than 4 (1) people (5.25 drives) into my car if I so please and not have to use a hacksaw to cut out part of the car.

I use Linux because the hardware it runs on is faster than the 'volkswagons' or the 'PT-cruisers' of the computer world and far less likely to flip going around the tight curves.

I use Linux because yes, it is cheaper and because yes, it does run on inexpensive fast hardware and give me the ability to use several operating systems on the same hardware if I so choose.

I use Linux because I do not believe on having choices taken away from me for no good reason and because I do not believe on form over function.

I use Linux because the community doesn't give me the feeling that unless I drive their car I'm somehow inferior.

Re:RedHat on new Macs?

[CapsaicinBoy]

OS X is a proprietary, largely untested OS with commercial support and a large number of commercial applications coming to it in the near future. It is BSD-based. The development team focuses mostly on the GUI.

Ummm. No. OSX is really NeXTstep 6.1 with a macintosh application environment thrown in. NeXTstep is a proven stable OS that predates Linux by at least 3 years. Furthermore, the core foundation of OSX, known as Darwin is also open source.

Re:RedHat on new Macs?

[Brian Kendig]

'Darwin,' the FreeBSD-based core of OS X, is open source:

http://www.opensource.apple.com/ [apple.com]

The interface, Aqua, isn't open-source because Apple wants to retain control of it.

I wouldn't call OS X 'largely untested.' It's directly based on NeXT's OPENSTEP operating system, which was known for being very stable and having great developer tools (the game 'Doom' was written on NeXT systems because of this), and OPENSTEP has lineage back to 4.3 BSD.

What's especially interesting is that Darwin runs on Intel PC's. This means that if Apple wanted to make Mac OS X available as an alternative to Microsoft Windows, all it would theoretically take is a recompile for the x86 architecture...

Re:Isn't this just rolling back Apple changes?

[devphil]

Uh, no. Not by a long shot.

First, the changes that Apple made to their own version of GCC were not well thought out. Those patches can't simply be applied to the real GCC.

Second, I don't know what "commercial GCC release" you're talking about. The AltiVec patches have been going into the publiv version of GCC for weeks now. Check their mailing list archives for all the gory details.

Re:The real worth here...

[tshak]

As cool and powerful as AltiVec is (arguably a more powerful SIMD Instruction Set then SSE2), I'm skeptical as to how much additional performance gain there will be. My skepticism was renewed when John Carmack made this post [slashdot.org].

people still use redhat?

[timecop]

7.2 still installs 20+ default services even in their "desktop" installation mode, with things like NFS, named, you name it...