Void Linux for PowerPC/Power ISA (unofficial)
Void Linux ppc is a staging fork of the Void Linux distribution intended for the PowerPC/Power architecture. It supports 64-bit and 32-bit hardware, with 64-bit supporting both little and big endian modes, while aiming to be legacy-free, using the ELFv2 ABI for both.
We have an explicit goal of upstreaming as many changes as possible - the project therefore retains a fairly small number of patches, most changes are merged into Void itself or upstream software projects as soon as they're ready.
Please see the documentation for up-to-date status information, installation instructions, FAQ and other resources.
Hardware support
Most distributions now support only 64-bit little endian hardware. Void-ppc aims to change this and work on a wide variety of hardware.
The little endian builds require POWER8 or newer, but the big endian flavor starts with 970/G5 (64-bit, AltiVec is required), while the 32-bit builds are completely generic.
C library support
The big endian variants are provided with glibc. Little endian versions come in both glibc and musl flavors.
Void-ppc uses a variant of the modern ELFv2 ABI (loosened not to impose the POWER8/VSX requirements of the specification) on 64-bit glibc, as the only distribution known to do so.
Package support
Void-ppc has a goal of as complete repository coverage as possible for all targets, not leaving anything behind.
Currently, our package coverage varies between 88% and 96% of unique packages depending on target (with 64-bit little endian having the best support) and we even ship some software others don't (e.g. Qt5 WebEngine).
Download installable base live images
PLEASE NOTE: If you choose Network as the installation source, a desktop environment will not be installed regardless of what you are booting!
It is, however, recommended to use network installation when you can, as only then you can get latest packages out of the box without having to update the system.
There are installable live images for all 6 archs. You need to choose the kind you want, and whether you want a desktop environment out of box or not.
All live images and rootfs tarballs are available at:
- https://repo.voidlinux-ppc.org/live/current
The ppc64le images have these requirements:
- At least a POWER8 CPU or equivalent (POWER ISA 2.07, with little endian AltiVec/VSX support; notably e6500 is not supported)
- Currently OpenFirmware (SLOF) and OpenPOWER based systems are tested
The ppc64 images have these requirements:
- At least a PowerPC 970 CPU or equivalent (AltiVec required; so 970/G5, Cell, POWER6/7/8/9, e6500 will work, while e5500 and POWER4/POWER5 will not)
- Currently OpenFirmware (SLOF, Apple) and OpenPOWER based systems are tested
The ppc images have these requirements:
- A generic PowerPC CPU
- Currently OpenFirmware based Apple systems are tested
All require at least 350MB disk space for installation. 64-bit systems should have at least 96MB RAM, 32-bit ones can do with less.
These may not be exhaustive, but the live images contain data necessary for boot on OF and OpenPOWER systems and utilize GRUB. If you succeed in running the live ISOs on other systems (or know how to make them work), please let us know.
Log in as anon/root, password voidlinux.
To start the installer just execute the void-installer utility with enough permissions (i.e sudo). The installer has paths for OpenPOWER, Apple and CHRP systems.
In addition to the plain command line image, there is also a graphical flavor with the Xfce desktop environment. Other graphical flavor images are currently not planned, as it’s a lot of effort to make and test them, but you can still install a desktop of your choice yourself.
It is recommended that you have enough RAM (at least 256 or 512MB) available when using the graphical images.
Verifying file integrity
The sha256sums.txt file contains the SHA256 hashes to verify the integrity of the downloaded files.
Mirrors
There are several mirrors to help lighten the load on the primary infrastructure.
Tier 1 mirrors sync directly from the primary and contain everything. They are also required to provide https. Other mirrors may sync from somewhere else and are allowed to host specific things only (and may not always be up to date).
To change your mirrors to use a different set, you must create files in /etc/xbps.d with the same names as those in /usr/share/xbps.d. Once you have created such files, replace the URL with one of the servers below. Only the files containing ‘repository’ in the filename need to be duplicated to /etc/xbps.d/.
The default is https://auto.voidlinux-ppc.org. This is supposed to be load-balancing between available Tier 1 mirrors, but that currently does not work, so it’s equivalent to the primary for the time being.
Tier 1 Mirrors
- https://repo.voidlinux-ppc.org (USA: Chicago)
- https://mirrors.servercentral.com/void-ppc (USA: Chicago)
Tier 2 Mirrors
- http://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/void-ppc (EU: Sweden)
- http://lysator7eknrfl47rlyxvgeamrv7ucefgrrlhk7rouv3sna25asetwid.onion/pub/void-ppc (EU: Sweden)
- https://ppc.exqa.de (EU: Germany)
