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. It supports both glibc and musl.
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.
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 flavors start with 970/G5 (64-bit, AltiVec is required), while the 32-bit builds are completely generic.
Just like Void itself, both glibc and musl are supported, resulting in 6 different flavors of the system.
As an oddity, Void-ppc uses the modern ELFv2 ABI on both little endian and big endian 64-bit builds. This is a requirement with the musl libc, but there is currently no other distribution using ELFv2 for glibc as well.
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).
The old batch was starting to show its age, so there are now some fresh ISO
images. There are also some significant improvements in them. They are marked
20200411. Of course, fresh rootfs tarballs are also included.
As usual, they are available in ppc64le (POWER8+), ppc64 (G5+) and ppc
(generic) variants, with glibc and musl both supported.
Let’s see:
There is now support for serial console integrated in the images, so you don’t necessarily need a monitor and/or go through a bunch of hoops to manually set up the serial console. All you need to do is append some things on the kernel command line.
For example, on a Talos 2/Blackbird/qemu-system-ppc64:
console=tty0 console=hvc0
The first will get you a monitor as usual, the second the serial console.
Keep in mind that it has to be last! There is a special hook in the live
initramfs that sets up the respective agetty services.
Since some Macs have trouble booting on recent 5.x kernels, we’re now shipping a 4.4 LTS kernel as an alternative to the primary (currently 5.4) one. You can choose between them in the bootloader. So if you have one of those affected machines, you can at least get the installer booted.
Keep in mind that with a network installation you’ll get the default kernel again. The installer gives you an option to drop into the installed system before rebooting. You can install a kernel of your choice there.
Since a bunch of people complained about the installer booting fine but the final system not being bootable and the issue turned out to be swapped parameter order when creating the bootstrap partition on their Mac (and therefore the partition having an incorrect type), the installer now checks whether the partition is correct and tells you ahead if it’s not.
If you’re one of those really unlucky people who can’t get GRUB to load and
there is no workaround (such one of those described in the FAQ), you can now
use yaboot to boot the image. The default is obviously GRUB, but you can
bring it up manually, e.g.:
boot ud:,\boot\yaboot conf=ud:,\etc\yaboot.conf
Of course, that doesn’t mean yaboot is supported in the installer; it’s still
old and obsolete, and doesn’t play nice with the rest of the system (and thus
requires manual maintenance). However, it allows you to get the ISO booted,
install the system without having it set up the bootloader, and set it up
afterwards by hand.
Since generating all those graphical flavor images took way too long, needed a ton of space, and some of them didn’t even work for various reasons, we are no longer shipping graphical flavors with the exception of Xfce. Keep in mind that this only applies to the live images! You can still install the desktop environment of your choice in the final system, of course.
The graphical flavor images for 32-bit PowerPC now ship Xorg drivers for
Rage 128 (r128) and Rage Pro (mach64). This could help some G3s and
so on, but do keep in mind that it won’t likely start up out of the box,
as the drivers always needed manual configuration (Xorg modelines, etc.)
There have also been assorted fixes in the installer, such as simpler and more robust code that takes care of setting up the NVRAM stuff to make Void boot as the default OS. And obviously, the software stack is fresh and updated.
That’s it for now. Grab a copy from the Download page, and test it if you have
the hardware. Any issues go into the bug tracker as always, and we have an IRC
channel as well (#voidlinux-ppc on Freenode).
Next batch will come once enough crucial fixes have accumulated, or once it starts getting dated again.
The binary repositories have now reached completeness, i.e. everything not explicitly marked so is now built.
That doesn’t mean we ship every single piece of potentially buildable software (notably Texlive is still missing and will need refactoring the templates to build it from source), but generally it’s in a similar state to other distributions and sometimes better (e.g. we ship qt5-webengine at least on some targets).
For current statistics, always refer to the Packages link in the menu.
Current TODO items include spinning a new set of ISO images (but before that, fix known installer issues, enable serial console access in live and some other things) and extending the documentation and FAQ.
Also, I’ve been granted commit access in upstream Void in December. That means the flow of upstream changes is now a lot quicker and smoother, and allows me to keep the repos in sync as much as possible. While it is not possible to mainline the whole project at this point other than source code (unfortunately Void right now cannot take in any more builders, native or cross, and I would ideally like to keep the builds native), having the source upstreamed is a big help and void-ppc will provide staging and binary repos indefinitely.
Speaking of that, our community member zdykstra has recently donated a new
primary hosting mirror, which means we now have a much greater storage space
as well as much faster network connectivity. The server is hosted in Chicago,
IL. There’s also a number of other mirrors to choose from.