Void Linux, a distribution we discussed earlier and known for its XBPS package manager and interesting design decisions such as using the Runit init system and supporting the Musl C library, is recently working on improving its POWER CPU -architectural support.
Daniel Kolesa, who is the primary maintainer of Void Linux’s POWER port, spoke earlier this month on FOSDEM 2021 about their improvements to IBM POWER / OpenPOWER hardware.
Void Linux for POWER has been working on 32-bit low endian support to complement the existing POWER 64-bit low endian support, as well as to already support POWER 32-bit and 64-bit in large endian mode. Void Linux has also offered patches for LibreSSL to provide faster crypto performance on POWER, such as Google Chromium working on POWER in their archive, supporting Electron applications on POWER and also getting great AMD Radeon graphics driver support working on POWER.
Void Linux on POWER was initially brought to PPC64LE on top of the Raptor Talos II Lite hardware and saw a lot of work in the years that followed. There are also improvements in OpenJDK Java, improvements to handling cross-tool chains, and more. For those with a POWER system like Raptor Computing Systems’ amazing free POWER9 hardware, the latest Void Linux seems to be a decent contender if they want a good POWER distribution.
For more information on Void Linux on POWER, see Daniel’s PDF slide deck of the FOSDEM virtual conference as well as the WebM / VP9 session recording.