Table of Contents

Ports on Tier-2 architectures

Although most of the FreeBSD user base uses machines running either the amd64 or i386 codebase, we do have users of our other architectures.

This document describes the architectures that the Ports Collection currently recognizes.

Package Sets

You can use portsmon to see more information about the build status of all buildenvs.

:!: the FreeBSD Ports Collection does not yet support 'true' cross-building. Currently, for cross-building we use emulated virtual machines via qemu. The table below discusses only native building and building on emulated instances.

Package sets are generally built on the oldest supported branch for each supported release.

arch build type built by current buildenvs updated see also
aarch64 native portmgr 11.1 ??? ports
amd64 native portmgr 10.4, 11.1, head ~weekly
armv6 emulation portmgr 11.1, head ~weekly ports
armv7 emulation portmgr head ~weekly ports
i386 native portmgr 10.4, 11.1, head ~weekly
powerpc native — —
powerpc64 native MarkLinimon 11.1 occasional ports
powerpcspe native — —
riscv64 — — —

Other notes: releases previous to FreeBSD 10.x; alpha, ia64, mips, mips64, and sparc64 support have been discontinued; sun4v support was never completed.

See also PortsBrokenOnTier2Architectures.

Architecture Considerations

Here are some tips and tricks about the architectures themselves. Some of this is condensed from the information in ArchitectureSpecifics. Often the Makefile code needed to make port work on the various 32-bit archs can be cribbed from i386; similarly for BE vs. LE considerations. The Jenkins column shows the state of -head src build/installs under Continuous Integration.