r/PowerPC • u/Zealousideal-Hour277 • 2d ago

AI and PowerPC BigEndian Linux

Thanks to artificial intelligence, almost anyone who loves retrocomputing can help keep this hardware alive. What are the most important modern software programs that don't run properly on Big Endian PowerPC Linux distributions? Can we list them?

16 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

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4

u/arjuna93 2d ago

Golang is broken on ppc32. It is also broken on older ppc64, I think.

OCaml 5 does not have ppc32 native codegen anymore.

Darktable and Ansel broken on BE

Angle / Skia likely got issues on BE

Lean 4 either broken or at least unsupported on BE

Duckdb, Tiledb, Mongodb: some known breakages, no proper support

1

u/Zealousideal-Hour277 1d ago

What about the modern web? Which component is missing in order to port modern browsers?

1

u/arjuna93 1d ago

I recon you mean GUI browsers?

Qt-based: Webengine

Chromium: Blink (also we got working v8 literally last week on macOS, perhaps remains broken on Linux)

WebKit-based: JIT (w/out it the build might work, but performance gonna be abysmal)

Firefox: rustc (for Linux not sure why it is still broken)

1

u/arjuna93 1d ago

P. S. I am not sure if all these hold for ppc64 specifically. Say, V8 should work there, outside of macOS (but likely still broken on Linux on pre-power8 CPUs).

3

u/Ill-Quit6803 2d ago

Didn't Linux drop support for PPC Big Endian ? Linux would probably be an important program then.

BSD similiar.

3

u/rjzak 2d ago

Some distros dropped support for Big Endian but the kernel still supports it (along with a lot of programming languages and compilers).

2

u/the_humeister 2d ago

FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD still have Big Endian PowerPC support. I wouldn't be surprised if FreeBSD drops support eventually, but I don't see NetBSD or OpenBSD doing that.

2

u/MacAddict81 2d ago

Well, it definitely would fly in the face of "NetBSD runs on anything," if they did.

1

u/the_humeister 2d ago

They've already gotten rid of VAX

1

u/imaweasle909 1d ago

No, just a lot of dirstros. Also PPC is still a modern chipsets afaik it's just not used by a lot of consumer technologies (US jet planes still run on G3s iirc).

1

u/arjuna93 1d ago

BSDs are not dropping BE.

FreeBSD dropped 32-bit support in 15.x, which means G4 cannot run it anymore (G5 need testing, 13–14 had a bug making FreeBSD unusable).
OpenBSD and NetBSD keep support for 32-bit BE. (Note, neither support ppc64 on older cpus, so on G5 you can only run them as ppc32.)

3

u/BirthdayLife6378 2d ago

What's the advantage of using big endian? The only thing I can think of is the IP address.

2

u/arjuna93 2d ago

At least moral advantage of using the right endianness :)

1

u/rjzak 2d ago

Easier debugging.

1

u/braaaaaaainworms 18h ago

No advantages. Little endian systems used in networking already have big endian loads and stores without the disadvantages of using big endian

2

u/Daggercombot 2d ago edited 2d ago

I have a tool called VibeSolaris which I am using to do the same thing on Sparc and Solaris. AI has really helped me. On the Mac PPC side i would like something like Box32 for PPC Macos.

1

u/aonbehamut 2d ago

Gentoo still does it but that's cause of course they do. As for the rest most dropped it. Fedora can still run, debian has an old one. Void Linux dropped support but you can get a somewhat modern one to run

1

u/tempsanity 1d ago

I've just installed Gentoo on an iMac G4 17" 1 Ghz from 2003. I know Archpower and Adelie are also options, although Gentoo seemed most established and reliable (although who knows how long they will support ppc32). In case they drop support, I hope I can switch to Archpower.