Void's POWER architecture port has been progressing steadily since the last OpenPOWER Summit EU talk in 2019. Recently we introduced a completely new 32-bit little endian port, which will be a big part of this talk's focus, and is a first among Linux distributions. I will not stay there though - we have more to cover, including stuff like Chromium and Electron applications in repos, faster POWER crypto in LibreSSL, reworked crosstoolchains, stable support for newest AMD GPUs, and our big endian variants are also receiving attention, including properly clearing up the 64-bit ABI situation.
Void Linux is an independent, rolling release, general purpose Linux distribution (leaning towards desktop/workstation focus) originally created in 2008 on the x86_64 architecture as a testbed for its own XBPS package manager. Over time, it has received a variety of ports, including 32-bit and 64-bit ARM, MIPS, and eventually POWER and PowerPC. It has variants for 64 and 32 bits, little and big endian, and glibc and musl C standard libraries. Most recently it has received an experimental 32-bit little endian port, which is a first among Linux distributions.
I will be focusing partially on the new port, and partially on other news in the distribution since my last talk I gave at OpenPOWER Summit EU 2019. I will explain our goals with the new port, as well as our plans. Additionally, the future of the distribution will also be covered, as well as currently remaining issues and blockers that prevent us from achieving that.
Speakers: Daniel Kolesa