[sword-devel] ppc64le build errors

[Greg Hellings]

It's been some months since build errors on the PPC64LE architecture in
Fedora cropped up. The errors all seem to be around the definition of
certain certain integer variable types and crop up like this[0].

Currently I'm building with this patch[1], provided by Jaak, to avoid the
problem. It switches out use of __u16, __s64, etc for std::uint_16t and the
like. However, as it is not considered best practice to maintain lots of
patches downstream as that foists work upon everyone else who wants to
package, I had requested Troy look at this. But, obviously, working with
PPC64LE Is not something we do in our daily work much.

Recent developments in Fedora and my own Googling have made this a bit more
accessible, if you have time to look into the build errors, Troy. I've just
been able to launch a ppc64le VM on my local machine with the following
steps:

0) Download the pre-packaged qcow2 image from the Fedora servers:
http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora-secondary/development/32/Cloud/ppc64le/images/
0.0) I suggest making a copy, in case something goes awry, then you have
the pristine image to boot from, so I just do "cp Fedora-Cloud<blah>.qcow2
fedora-32.qcow2" and then can restore from the downloaded if I need to
1) Install qemu-system-ppc64 and cloud-utils on your local host (at least
that's the package names in Fedora)
2) Write out this cloud-init file[2] to the same directory where you
downloaded the Fedora image with the filename "user-data" (the file has
more than is bare minimum necessary)
3) Generate the cloud-init ISO file by running "cloud-localds config.iso
user-data"
4) Boot the system with this command:
qemu-system-ppc64 -machine pseries -cpu power8 -nodefaults -nographic
-serial stdio -hda fedora-32.qcow2 -netdev bridge,br=virbr0,id=net0 -device
virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0 -cdrom config.iso -m 2048

The resulting machine is slow but functional (you can increase the RAM by
increasing the "2048" at the end, and you can probably enable
multi-processing if you really want to but I haven't toyed with it). It can
sometimes take as much as 10 minutes to fully boot, sometimes it's up in 90
seconds on my relatively modern i7 laptop. From the command line you can
install the necessary tools, just like you would on any other Fedora VM
(sudo dnf install make cmake libcurl-devel libicu-devel gcc-c++)

The "-cdrom config.iso" argument is only necessary on the first boot to
setup login, which will be username "vagrant" and password "vagrant" as
specified in the user-data file.

I would like to streamline this for you, but I have a mountain of things on
my plate and I don't know if I'll get to it in a reasonable amount of time.
Meanwhile, these new-ish qcow2 images that are coming from the Fedora folk
make it very reasonable to get a local VM booted for test purposes.

Hopefully this gives you the platform to figure out what's going on in
ppc64le land and maybe work up a mainline patch before we get to the 1.9
series.

-Greg

[0] https://gist.github.com/greg-hellings/a6756fdf6081038fe97569f74a28f00e
[1]
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/sword/blob/master/f/sword-1.8.1-integer-types.diff
[2] https://gist.github.com/greg-hellings/9a9dca49c7fe62311f7f7232e7da1278
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