Fedora 41, Acpica-tools Remove Big Endian Support

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1

I read that in the accepted changes of Fedora 41: “Acpica-tools Remove Big Endian Support”.

I use Fedora to run X11 applications, for example, Oracle Installation GUI (runInstaller) , Oracle Wallet Manager (owm), etc…

Our servers are Oracle SPARC Solaris is Big Endian. I am setting byte swapping by using ‘gsettings set …’ command, and those apps are running well.

Does that mean that we can no longer run X11 Oracle SPARC Solaris applications?

2

I don’t know about the Big Endian support issue, but it seems common knowledge that with f41 Fedora intends to remove X11 support from the default installation of Fedora Workstation. X11 will still be available but will need to be explicitly installed by the user.

Fedora is pushing the bleeding edge and for those of us who still rely on older tech such as X11 it is getting tougher to remain in our old ‘ruts’. The same seems to apply to the Big Endian issue.

This forum is not dedicated to the development or testing of rawhide nor to planning so the question probably should be directed to the management.

3

Added fedora-rawhide, sparc

4

Just to add that I am using Gnome Wayland and not Xorg.

So in Fedora 40 and GNOME Wayland, I am running the following command:

“gsettings set org.gnome.mutter.wayland xwayland-allow-byte-swapped-clients true”

All GUI apps on SPARC Solaris are running fine afterwards.

How can I redirect this question to management?

Regards.

5

The change you mentioned only affects the acpica-tools package on S390x HW. Acpica-tools and packages that depend on it will no longer run on this architecture.
This is my understanding of this change.

You should still be able to run programs on a remote Big Endian HW and redirect their X11 windows to a little Endian Fedora desktop. This function is provided by the Xwayland server. It swaps the bytes of X11 payload data sent by the Big Endian HW.

6

You can turn on byte swap at your own risk and you should be able to talk to the SPARC X11. I don’t think the code will be removed, just disabled.

The issue is that the code paths for byte-swap are almost never used and it is suspected that they are buggy. At this point in the Xservers life no one is interested in working on the issue.