Void Linux Has Been Working To Deliver Great POWER Support

Void Linux, a rolling-release distribution we have covered before that is known for its XBPS package manager and interesting design decisions like using the Runit init system and supporting the Musl C library, has recently been working on enhancing its POWER CPU architecture support.

Daniel Kolesa who serves as the primary maintainer for the POWER port of Void Linux spoke at FOSDEM 2021 earlier this month on their improvements to benefit IBM POWER / OpenPOWER hardware.

Void Linux for POWER has been working on 32-bit little endian support to complement the existing POWER 64-bit little endian support as well as already supporting POWER 32-bit and 64-bit in big endian mode. Void Linux has also been carrying patches for LibreSSL to offer faster crypto performance on POWER, getting the likes of Google Chromium running on POWER in their archive, supporting Electron applications on POWER, and also getting good AMD Radeon graphics driver support working on POWER.

Void Linux on POWER was initially brought to PPC64LE atop the Raptor Talos II Lite hardware and in the years since has been seeing much work. There has also been OpenJDK Java improvements, cross-toolchain handling improvements, and more. For those with a POWER system like Raptor Computing Systems' wonderful libre POWER9 hardware, the latest Void Linux appears to be a decent contender if wanting a good rolling-release POWER distribution.

For more details about Void Linux on POWER see Daniel's PDF slide deck from the virtual FOSDEM conference as well as the WebM/VP9 session recording.