Collaborate with OpenHPC

[adrianreber]

Just had a look at your fork of OpenHPC. Have you thought about bringing some of your changes to the main repository? How about the ppc64le part?

[viniciusferrao]

Hi @adrianreber sorry for the extremely delayed answer. I just reacted with entusiam but didn't answered anything.

Yes we do want to collaborate. We didn't pushed anything because we tought it was out of scope. But yes let's do it.

The ppc64le seems to be the easiest one to start, however there is a blocker: OBS. It does not work on ppc64le, we tried to use it but was a no go and we ended up using mock to compile and test the packages in our IBM AC922 server.

Anything I've took some time to prepare what could be a start, PR #13 is an initial effort to push ppc64le upstream (in code only) without breaking what already exists.

The ideia is that every ppc64le-specific change is gated by %ifarch ppc64le, so x86_64 and aarch64 are unaffected. The baseline is -mcpu=power9, matching the EL9+ ppc64le distro minimum requirements.

I will push this PR through the 4.x branch and we can discuss if more work need to be done.

The verification process I took was to built every touched package from source on both x86_64 and ppc64le to check if there's any regression, and it seems everything was fine.

Finally still on the table is the OBS issue, that frankly I don't know if we would be able to address. I see that OpenHPC moved on from LaTeX on the docs, maybe it's time to upgrade the build system? Of course that's OpenHPC decision and not ours.

Thank for the invitation @adrianreber. Let's work.

[adrianreber]

Cool. I will bring this to our technical steering committee to discuss, but I do not see a problem.

For building I am thinking we could take the SRPMs from OBS and build them in COPR. Many years ago I built all OpenHPC in Fedora's COPR on ppc64le. That would be one way. For GitHub Actions we could use something like https://github.com/IBM/actionspz/issues

If you are ready, let's open the PR on the main OpenHPC repository and we can verify in a first step that it doesn't break anything and then in a second step think about the builds. It sounds like you also have access to a builder so you could also build the packages once the SRPMS are generated by OBS.

Upgrading the build system is something that is always something I am thinking about a bit, but the way we build multiple versions of packages with different MPIs works pretty good in OBS. Not sure. Our GitHub Actions CI script seem to handle it pretty good for pre-verification.

[adrianreber]

@viniciusferrao I started to build the latest packages for 4.2 also on ppc64le: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/adrian/ohpc-ppc64le/packages/

[viniciusferrao]

@adrianreber I will push the small ppc64le changes that are on our fork today.

[adrianreber]

@viniciusferrao Next week Wednesday (2026-07-08) we have our next OpenHPC TSC meeting. Can you join to talk about your ppc64le work and maybe also the Debian packages you have?