Fedora 19 ppc64 Beta release

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Hi Folks,

Last week, the Fedora ppc64 team announced the availability of their beta for Fedora 19.  The announcement can be found at -> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F19_PPC_Beta_release_announcement   Please take the time to read the announcement fully through as both the ppc64 and x86 announcements point out specific gotchas for Fedora users.

As for the ppc64 beta, I'd like to point out and expand on a few notable items in the beta itself:

• Fedora 19 now ships with an llvmpipe enabled software rendorer.  This is a big change for ppc64.  We started engaging the llvm community about one year ago because it was clear that Gnome 3 was going to need a decent software renderer.  Through the ups and downs, we now, like x86_64, have llvmpipe enabled so that gnome 3 can use multiple processor threads to do its thing.  If you used gnome in F18 for ppc64, you'll be glad for the new llvmpipe stack.
• We are still delivering POWER7 optimized RPMS with Fedora 19.  We started a few more than a dozen source packages resulting in about 2 or more dozen optimized RPMs including the kernel itself.  These RPMs are compiled with -O3 and mtune/mcpu=power7.  We not only benefit from the CFLAG options, but with a modern toolchain, these options will trigger good things, among them automatic vectorization.
• Multipath installations still seem to be problematic even with the beta. Although we did have multipath working nicely in pre-beta candidate, it appears to addition of new device-mapper-multipath packages has regressed us.  Please continue to check our daily isos, as that will be where it's fixed first.
• Some activities such as debugging are impacted by an issue with binutil's libbfd. In Fedora 18, the toolchain developers started to compress the debuginfo packages to preserve space on people's systems.  This compression has impacted utilities like objdump and oprofile because they directly interact with libbfd and cannot deal with the compressed packages.  This means that you will see dwarf errors when trying to resolve symbols and the like.  This is being tracked in -> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=965255
• The F19 beta is based on a 3.9 kernel, gcc 4.8, and glibc 2.17.

We hope you get a chance to try the beta.  The Fedora team is always in need of assistance and would welcome both feedback and help.  We hang out in IRC on freenode in the #fedora-ppc channel.