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

On Mon, 17 Nov 2025 at 08:58, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

I think unlike armv7 and mips, there's still a lot of ppc64 stuff being
made and it's also very big iron.

We did pretty well when the foundation sponsored getting that what, power4
box back in the day? or something bigger? i forget, it was like 10 years
ago now.

I've seen some interest in IRC about working on it, but as I said, the
challenge is finding affordable hardware. Maybe that's something we can try
and address this cycle.



-adrian