Re: What's the plan for powerpc64 in FreeBSD 16

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Konstantin Belousov" <[email protected]>
> To: "Timothy Pearson" <[email protected]>
> Cc: "Warner Losh" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
> Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2025 5:11:39 AM
> Subject: Re: What's the plan for powerpc64 in FreeBSD 16

> On Tue, Nov 18, 2025 at 04:12:15AM -0600, Timothy Pearson wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> > From: "Konstantin Belousov" <[email protected]>
>> > To: "Timothy Pearson" <[email protected]>
>> > Cc: "Warner Losh" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]"
>> > <[email protected]>
>> > Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2025 4:09:41 AM
>> > Subject: Re: What's the plan for powerpc64 in FreeBSD 16
>> 
>> > Can we please, as the part of the commitment for the ppc support, have
>> > a patch submitted for the rtld wart fix?
>> > I mean, we should have properly architectured hook for ppc64 to do the
>> > hack in libexec/rtld-elf/rtld.c under the #ifdef powerpc, for auxv
>> > renumbering compat.
>> 
>> I don't see why not.  This is exactly the reason we have FTE resources assigned
>> to maintain the software ecosystem for ppc64 -- if there are any other such
>> issues just let me know and I'll make sure they get fixed.
> 
> Great.
> In fact, I went ahead and drafted the change I want, in
> https://reviews.freebsd.org/D53801
> 
> I am not sure if this is needed for both ppc and ppc64/ppc64le.
> Also I did not handled other arches until ppc part is finalized.
> 
> Could you please get somebody answer the question above, and then
> have the patch tested, please?

Great, thank you for putting that together!

This should be required for all ppc* including 32-bit per my understanding.

As a historical note / aside, 32-bit support is not of any importance to the general modern POWER ecosystem at this point; I'm on the architectural committee handling the ISA specification, and in general we have no desire to attempt to add 32-bit support to the current POWER standards.  I personally wouldn't be opposed to seeing 32-bit support disappear at this point; it was never properly standardized and I have no idea what kind of hardware would actually execute 32-bit FreeBSD kernels at this point.

I'll get testing results back later today and update the diff log.

One other question -- is there a way Raptor (or even just myself) can get approval rights for changes that touch the ppc* code?  One of the reasons we haven't been pushing as much code upstream as we'd like is that we've had a lot of stalls in the review and merge process due to what I assume is lack of reviewer availability / hardware availability, and I want to see if we can help make that process faster.  We have a datacenter full of POWER boxes and would be happy to provide remote access (including bare metal) free of charge to anyone that is blocked on hardware availability.

Thanks again!