Re: Bhyve on ppc64

On Fri, 21 Mar 2025, at 08:31, Michael Dexter wrote:
> On 3/3/25 10:04 AM, Joe Nosay wrote:
>> Has this been built; or, will I need to edit?
>
> By edit, do you mean update the FreeBSD sources to support Power 
> virtualization?

Hi Dexter, Joe,

I read Joe's question as "is there bhyve on ppc64". Unless there's
a private fork, today bhyve exists on amd64, arm64, risvc only -
see the subdirs https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/usr.sbin/bhyve .

> Power, RISC-V, and ARM64 virtualization came up on Thursday with 
> enthusiasm about various Power platforms:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQwnlNL4cOI
>
> Does anyone know why there are no PPC VM-IMAGES?
>
> Dexter

In answer to your question, why no PPC VM IMAGES, it needs 2 things:

- patches to /usr/src/release/tools/ to build the appropriate images
  from sources (i.e. locally for developers)
- an indication of enough demand to add the plumbing so that these
  images are built as part of releng tooling like we do regularly
  for stable/current/releases etc (i.e. on downloads.freebsd.org )

The patches themselves aren't typically complicated, you just need
to get familiar with the Makefiles that are used for other platforms
in here https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/release/ .

The latter question is up for debate, I expect the venn diagram of
people using ppc, and people who will use VM images *but can't build
them from sources* is not big enough to justify building & storing
the images every week on all the mirrors, but making it available
for people to build them from sources seems reasonable, if somebody
wants to work on it.

It *may* also require proper qemu ppc64 support, I don't know if
that's already possible, to cross-build packages on amd64 builders,
for ppc64 architecture.

A+
Dave