As of this writing (20191207), ports on powerpc are built using the (ancient) base system GCC 4.2.1. 12-STABLE users will continue with that. However, 13-CURRENT users should expect an llvm/elfv2 flag day sometime in 2019Q4. See llvm-elfv2 cutover.

Most comments in this file apply to ports built using either compiler. Exceptions are called out explicitly.

See PortsOnGcc.

Almost all ports do build via GCC. Pre-built packages are available for 12.0R and 13-CURRENT via the usual methods. Only the quarterly branch is built for 12.0R; for 13-CURRENT, only the head branch is built.

However, as powerpc64 is a tier-2 platform in FreeBSD, ports are not at parity with e.g. amd64; there are still a number of ports ignored, skipped, and failing to build. We have several volunteers working on the problem but more are needed, especially in the area of testing.

Please contact MarkLinimon if you want to help and/or to see the error log from the last time any of the failing ports was attempted.

Results are preliminary. See PortsOnClang.

These comments are common to both GCC-based and llvm-based systems.

Many of the GUI ports (Gnome, KDE, and so forth) depend on devel/libsoup. To build this port you need either:

• 13-CURRENT after src r341387
• 12-STABLE after src r343207

• This commit did not make it into 12.0R, nor is it current reflected in the 12-quarterly package builds, since they are based on 12.0R.

• Package builds will continue to be based on 12.0R until its EOL on February 4, 2020. In the meantime, you will need to build this package yourself.

These comments are common to both GCC-based and llvm-based systems.

We are actively working to resolve these.

See also: PortsBrokenOnTier2Architectures

• kde5 needs more work. It doesn't build 100% because webengine fails. (On 12-quarterly, see above.)
• firefox and thunderbird fail.

This list is not comprehensive. Does not include things marked BROKEN or NOT_FOR.

Roughly sorted by # affected, descending. #affected may reflect a partial build.

Updated 20191207.

In 12 and later, there are over 100 port regressions based on ssl. These affect all archs and most are out of scope of this discussion. Almost all are already marked BROKEN, on all architectures.

There are around 158 ports marked BROKEN specifically on powerpc64. These are ports that we believe could possibly be fixed on FreeBSD (as opposed to NOT_FOR_ARCHS/ONLY_FOR_ARCHS where we believe that upstream would have to make changes).

Runs with TRYBROKEN set are periodically made to check that they still fail; here are the ones from 20190415.

TRYBROKEN builds do not include things marked NOT_FOR/ONLY_FOR. Those have to be manually edited and forced.

This list is not comprehensive.

Roughly sorted by # affected, descending. #affected may reflect a partial build.

Updated 20190705.

• GPU acceleration doesn't work (probably because of our GCC), so running Gnome and KDE may actually be displeasing.

See repositories.