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I want to install slackware x86 in a ppc pc? Can I do it?

If not, if I compile only the kernel to ppc, may it work?

Are There any ways to accomplish this??

thaks for all answers! and sorry for my bad english.

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When i was using slamd64, i could install x86 32bits and x86 64bits on the same os, why i cant make this in ppc? – drigoSkalWalker Oct 13 '09 at 13:19
x86_64 is a superset of x86 (kinda). It's possible to run x86 code on x86_64. PPC is wildly different. You cannot run code compiled for x86 on PPC. – Colin Pickard Oct 13 '09 at 13:29
FYI, you need to study up on what an ISA is a bit before you think about this. – Paul Nathan Oct 13 '09 at 15:31

migrated from stackoverflow.com Oct 15 '09 at 0:07

4 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

No, you can't. You need code compiled for PPC.

The Slackintosh project is based on Slackware, but for PPC. You may want to check them out.

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SlackIntosh is very old, and i want to use x86 slackware repository, no other way to make this? – drigoSkalWalker Oct 13 '09 at 13:17
No, you cannot use the x86 repository; at least not the compiled binaries, they will not execute on PPC. You would need to compile everything from source. There are modern PPC distros you could use instead - Fedora and Debian for example maintain current PPC releases (fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-ppc and debian.org/releases/stable) – Colin Pickard Oct 13 '09 at 13:27
up vote 2 down vote

You can't run a kernel compiled for x86 on a different architecture, because the other architecture has a different set of instructions. It is almost like trying to compile a Java program with a C++ compiler on a lower level.

You can compile the kernel for the new architecture, but you'll also need the other executables you're going to run on top of your kernel for your new architecture.

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up vote 2 down vote

You can use an emulator like qemu or bochs to install a second OS (for a different CPU) on your existing OS. That allows you to use the second OS and all apps that were made for it.

The only other alternative is to compile everything again for your new CPU because CPUs can't learn foreign languages.

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No, you can't! Emulators cannot emulate a complete different chipset! At least not without a huge performance loss. – Wim ten Brink Oct 13 '09 at 13:10
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VirtualBox and VMWare are NOT emulators - they allow you to run a virtual machine inside your host OS, but they run the guest OS natively (using hardware virtualization support in the CPU if available). You cannot use this to emulate an entirely different CPU architecture. – Jesper Oct 13 '09 at 13:21
That was true in 1999 but we've gone some way since them. You can run a JIT compiler on the code, for example. You can replace known code pieces with calls to functions in the real OS. – Aaron Digulla Oct 13 '09 at 13:21
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@Jesper: bochs is a soft emulator which works anywhere. – Aaron Digulla Oct 13 '09 at 13:22
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qemu emulates an x86 system on ppc just fine, and much faster than bochs, because qemu does dynamic cod translation/recompilation and bochs is a straight interpreter. – ephemient Oct 13 '09 at 15:11
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up vote 1 down vote

PPC and x86 use two very different instruction sets. PPC processors do not even implement much of the functionality of a modern x86 CPU because PPC processors only offer a reduced instruction set.

Pretend you've bought a brand new mobile phone, but it is in a language you can't understand, and the supplied instruction manual is for a completely different brand and model. That is what x86 Slackware will look like to a PPC.

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