Void Linux for PowerPC/Power ISA is a currently unofficial staging fork of the Void Linux distribution that is meant, as the name says, for PowerPC and Power architecture devices. Its primary goal is upstreaming support for the architecture into the upstream distribution. Its secondary goal is to provide people with a complete, production ready distribution while there is still no official repository.
Void currently has no official support for the architecture. While vast majority of the actual source changes have been upstreamed (and therefore, official void-packages can compile most things just fine), there is no official binary repository. The reason for this is largely technical, as the build infrastructure does not seem to be able to handle any more builders. This may persist for a while, and that’s where this fork comes in.
We put emphasis on wide hardware support. Therefore, you can run the distro on a lot of different devices, including modern OpenPOWER hardware such as the Raptor Talos 2 and Blackbird, various old PowerPC Macs (G3/G4/G5) and even consoles like Nintendo Wii U. The distribution supports both 32-bit and 64-bit hardware, and both little and big endian for 64-bit hardware.
Besides the things that set Void itself apart from the others, the PowerPC fork has some unique aspects of its own. For example, it uses the modern ELFv2 ABI not only on little endian targets but also on big endian for both glibc and musl and even the kernel itself. We aim to be legacy free, and being a new port, making that a reality becomes a lot easier.
In total we have six flavors of the distro, ppc64le, ppc64le-musl, ppc64, ppc64-musl, ppc and ppc-musl. The requirements and hardware support of each is described in other sections.
Last but not least, wide software support is also important. The project aims for a complete repository coverage (where applicable) and therefore parity with x86_64 on all targets. This is a work in progress, and the repository sizes may differ.
Since we provide custom repositories, our fork of void-packages is also updated to use those. Therefore, as a user, you can build your own packages effortlessly, just like if you were on x86_64.
