How can I find Power PC specific charms?

Question

Is there a method to search specifically for those charms that support installation on Ubuntu 14.04 LE on Power PC?

Answer 1

We do not have a list of charms that support Power PC (ppc64le) because the majority of the charms work on that platform. Starting with 14.04 the Ubuntu archives have been compiled for ppc64le architecture, so the charms that install packages from the Ubuntu archives will continue to work as before.

Some charms install from Personal Package Archives (PPA) and those packages may or may not be compiled for ppc64le. As the name suggests those archives are privately owned and maintained and may not have been compiled for ppc64le architecture. Any other charms that install binaries from other private locations may not have ppc64le architecture options.

There was an effort to identify the charms that do not work well on ppc64le and fix the charms. Some charms have already been fixed. Bugs have been filed for charms that someone has identified not working on ppc64le in launchpad. Use this URL to list those bugs:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/charms?field.searchtext=ppc64le

If you find any other problems with charms on ppc64le be sure to report a bug on launchpad.net and tag the bug with ppc64le.

Answer 2

We currently do not have a way to show you exactly which charms run on which architectures.

Ideally it shouldn't matter, but since charms can grab packages from anywhere it really depends. Here's the general hand-wavy way to tell:

• Any charm using docker won't work (as docker doesn't run on ppc64le yet)
• Any charm using a third-party repository probably doesn't work unless that project has specifically published ppc64le binaries. Some like, Elasticsearch, do not. Here's an example from when that happens.

Any charm that is just apt-get installing from the normal Ubuntu repositories or PPAs should Just Work. For PPAs some maintainers might not know there's a checkbox for enabling POWER-builds, but that can be fixed with a simple email to the maintainer.

In the future when ppc64le is added to the CI system for charms this will become easy to tell, we're just not quite there yet. For charms that don't run on ppc64le it's usually best to find out what the exact problem is, and then reporting it appropriately so that someone can fix it.