Re: What's the plan for powerpc64 in FreeBSD 16

Hello Warner,

Am Mon, Nov 17, 2025 at 09:57:57AM -0700 schrieb Warner Losh:
> Greetings,
> 
> As we're getting close to the release date for FreeBSD 15.0, it's time to
> take stock of another architectures. This time, I'd like your feedback on
> the following plans.
> 
> We'd like to retire powerpc64 and powerpc64le just before the FreeBSD
> stable/16 branch.
> 
> This would give powerpc64 another two years of support in main, followed by
> sustaining support on stable/14 and stable/15 until the end of those
> branches.
> 
> We've come to this point because the port is dwindling and we have a cost
> associated with keeping it around. The number of developers has fallen off
> so only a couple remain. Issues in powerpc are taking longer and longer to
> discover and resolve. The hardware has been a huge source of frustration
> for clusteradmin and we've no alternative for developers. There's only a
> tiny user base. We have trouble building packages for it. Also, powerpc has
> a number of interesting features of the architecture that make it the odd
> arch out.
> 
> It's also big endian. While that may seem like a reason to keep it around,
> if we really can't support it and we're not actively testing functionality
> of the system, then keeping this around actually doesn't help keep us
> honest. It just gives us a burden we must bear.
> 
> In my opinion, powerpc64 appears to have already fallen below critical
> mass, despite being a sentimental favorite for a number of FreeBSD
> developers. As such, I'd like us to consider planning to retire it before
> we branch 16.
> 
> My questions today: Are you using this port? How many people are using it?
> And what's the installed base? It appears to be somewhat less than that of
> either i386 or armv7 based on user surveys and popularity at conferences.
> Also, any other comments you might have.

I don't mind if powerpc goes the way of the dodo; it should perhaps stay
around as a buildworld target for powerpc jails on powerpc64, but it seems
way less important than i386 on amd64 or armv7 on aarch64.

As for big endian, I do believe it is of value to support at least one big
endia platform, just to make sure our code base is endian-agnostic.  NetBSD
supports aarch64eb, which seems to run fine on some RPi variants, and perhaps
it could be possible to add such a platform as Tier 3 to FreeBSD, too.  Maybe
I'll find some time for it in the future...

Yours,
Robert Clausecker

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