Building powerpc (32-bit) packages on amd64

[Gustavo Romero]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for sharing your recipe and results.

In fact I realized last week that indeed ppc32 binaries don't exist in the
mirrors and I could not find any replacement for them.

I've tried to kick a build of gcc9 on ppc32 G4 and hit a couple of issues which
I was able to work around. I have not tried other packages yet. On of the
issues looks related specific with that kind of build environment, i.e real
G4 HW, so cross-compiling looks a nice alternative.

So yeah, please keep us posted on your progress building the ppc32 binaries on
amd64 :)

Cheers,
Gustavo

On 11/09/2019 03:25 AM, Daniel Benjamin Miller wrote:
> While it's not normally supported, I have managed to build powerpc packages on amd64, for a 32-bit target. I recently obtained a PowerBook G4 and was interested in running FreeBSD on it. So I installed the base system, but found that there were no binaries out there. Somebody had an unofficial server in ~2015 but it looks like there's nothing on the web now. Compiling ports on a G4 is torturous, so I decided to give it a whirl on my amd64 computer. The issue was that I couldn't run powerpc (32-bit) FreeBSD in QEMU, and it seemed that cross-compiling using poudriere was not supported with a powerpc target from an amd64 host. I've been able to generate some packages using the following method:
> 
> 1. Run a FreeBSD-CURRENT (powerpc64) virtual machine under Linux, using the command sudo qemu-system-ppc64 -M pseries-2.12-sxxm -smp 2 -mem-path /dev/hugepages -drive file=bsd.img -m 12G -boot c as my boot command. (Before this, you'll need to have a CD attached, of course, in order to install it.)
> 
> 2. Compile pkg, then pkg install poudriere.
> 
> 3. Add a simple poudriere.conf (I just went with the example).
> 
> 4. Create poudriere's data folder.
> 
> 5. poudriere ports -c
> 
> 6. poudriere jail -c -j ppc32 -v 12.1-RELEASE -a powerpc
> 
> 7. Create a file and then run poudriere bulk -f <myfile> -j ppc32
> 
> And it all seems to work. Once my job is done, I will post my unofficial binaries in a publicly accessible repository. I don't know if the project maintainers would be potentially interested in using this method to compile powerpc (32-bit) binaries on modern hardware (being that the userbase for this architecture is, in all likelihood, fairly small). Nevertheless, these packages should make my PowerBook G4 somewhat more useful as a FreeBSD system.
> 
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