[PATCHES] PPC (PowerPC) Linux support for powerpc-linux and powerpc64-linux targets

cedric Wrote:You right, I can not generate powerpc64-linux libraries with my macmini, except with cross-compilation, but I am not sure of how to do that. I will ask Araldor for these libraries.

I'm a little worried about where to go with ppc64 at the moment. There isn't great support in Debian and Ubuntu for a pure 64-bit user land, and it doesn't appear that there is a 64-bit version of all of xbmc's dependent libraries in the powerpc arch. I don't think I'm ready to think about other distros.

Multiarch seems to be the future for Debian and Ubuntu. So, I think we'll see mixed 32/64 userland support improving over time for power, and I don't think there's much effort going into pure 64-bit for power.

Since, xbmc builds and runs okay on a ppc64 machine with a ppc64 kernel and a 32-bit userland. I'm starting to think we should just focus on 32-bit powerpc and forget about ppc64 until distro support improves.

Comments? Does anyone actually run a pure ppc64 distro that wants xbmc support?

As long as your forward progress isn't hindering future ability to go pure 64-bit I don't see why this would be a problem.

araldor Wrote:Since, xbmc builds and runs okay on a ppc64 machine with a ppc64 kernel and a 32-bit userland. I'm starting to think we should just focus on 32-bit powerpc and forget about ppc64 until distro support improves.

Does it mean we could simply use powerpc32 shared objects instead of the 64 bits ones ? If it is the case, when building powerpc64-linux target, we could define both flags _POWERPC and _POWERPC64, so that when a 64bits library is missing, the 32bit one would be used instead.

I don't think it would just be when the library is missing. It would probably be like the AMD64 architecture. You can run 32-bit binaries, but if you do, all of the libraries need to be 32-bit as well.

cedric Wrote:Does it mean we could simply use powerpc32 shared objects instead of the 64 bits ones ? If it is the case, when building powerpc64-linux target, we could define both flags _POWERPC and _POWERPC64, so that when a 64bits library is missing, the 32bit one would be used instead.

I'm afraid not. If you want to run a 64-bit XBMC, then all of the libraries it links to need to be 64-bit versions.

It's likely that we could build ppc64 versions of all of the XBMC libraries in the sources/. However, many of the other libaries that XBMC relies on don't have ppc64 versions in debian or ubuntu (SDL, libfreetype, liblzo, etc.). I don't want to maintain ppc64 versions of all of those libraries and their dependencies.

I'd rather focus on powerpc32 at the moment.

Here is a new patch
http://www.4shared.com/file/53767116/d6d...egtar.html

Description:
Adding a build script for ffmpeg libraries, and copying the *.so files in xbmc.

Modified files:
XBMC/xbmc/cores/ffmpeg/DllAvCodec.h
XBMC/xbmc/cores/ffmpeg/DllAvFormat.h
XBMC/xbmc/cores/ffmpeg/DllSwScale.h
XBMC/xbmc/cores/ffmpeg/DllPostProc.h

Added files:
XBMC/system/players/dvdplayer/avcodec-51-powerpc-linux.so
XBMC/system/players/dvdplayer/avformat-51-powerpc-linux.so
XBMC/system/players/dvdplayer/avutil-51-powerpc-linux.so
XBMC/system/players/dvdplayer/swscale-51-powerpc-linux.so
XBMC/system/players/dvdplayer/postproc-51-powerpc-linux.so
sources/dvdplayer/ffmpeg/build_powerpc-linux_xbmc.sh

Added directory:
sources/dvdplayer/ffmpeg/faac : this is the simple extract of faac-1.26.tar.gz, which is included in avcodec-51-powerpc-linux.so

Video playback is now possible with lots of video formats, but color space is not yet fixed (wrong colors, I have a working patch but not enough clean to commit), and ALSADirectSound.cpp should be modified to have correct sound (I will provide a patch later).

-Cedric

Do we need faac? Do we do encoding?

araldor Wrote:I'm afraid not. If you want to run a 64-bit XBMC, then all of the libraries it links to need to be 64-bit versions.

It's likely that we could build ppc64 versions of all of the XBMC libraries in the sources/. However, many of the other libaries that XBMC relies on don't have ppc64 versions in debian or ubuntu (SDL, libfreetype, liblzo, etc.). I don't want to maintain ppc64 versions of all of those libraries and their dependencies.

I'd rather focus on powerpc32 at the moment.

Okidoki, good idea, the porting for the powerpc32 will be faster this way

- Cedric

malloc Wrote:Do we need faac? Do we do encoding?

No idea libfaac is used with i486-linux target
I think you can rip audio cd with xbmc

Not a good reason to throw in a new library. Let's figure this out. What is the error message you without it? Does the --enable/disable-altivec flag in configuring ffmpeg change this error?