The virtual kernel work Matthew Dillon is doing will help support architectures other than x86 someday, but the work isn’t complete yet.
I post this in part because I see people ask “Does DragonFly support the AMD64?” relatively often. There’s also other platforms that are becoming more common (ARM) or less (PowerPC) that would be nice to support.
Of course, AMD64 is a relative term, since it certainly works on AMD64 – you’re reading this web page served from such a system now.
PowerPC based systems are actually becoming more common, not less. All three major game consoles are using PowerPC variants: The Sony PlayStation 3 uses a 3.2GHz cell processor, the Microsoft XBox360 uses a 3.2GHz tri-core chip (Xenon), and the Nintendo Wii uses a PPC440 variant which is supposed to be 20% more power efficient than its 4.9 watt predecessor.
All in all, pretty good pickings.
I do not agree about PowerPC: It’s less common in the desktop world but a lot more common in the embedded systems world.
Remember the following devices are embedded systems:
– Most Networking machines: routers, embedded servers…
– Set Top Boxes: Video Disk Recoders like TiVO, DVB receivers…
– ATM machines: banks, Ticket purchases (train, concert, etc.), loading monetary value into pre-paid cards (cell phones, tolls, multi purpose stored value cards, etc.), purchasing postal stamps, games and promotional features, donations to charities, bar code scanning, video stores…
– Printers: specially high-end systems (with ethernet ports having printer server built-in and other features) now uses PowerPC. In the past those systems used 68060, a Motorola derivation of the 68k family used on servers, embedded systems and unofficial solutions for upgrading 68k-based systems.
– Automotive: Ford, Daimler Benz cars and other car manufacturers.
– Medical Equipments: Horatio, Matrox…
– Military and Aerospace
For some more info look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_Implementations
PowerPC is not less common, it reduced the market share in the desktop world but widered A LOT in the “invisible” market of embedded systems. Embedded systems are less knowed because people use it but not know what’s inside (and not need it, users only want to use them without know technical stuff).