As of this writing (20210128), ports on powerpc (FreeBSD 11 and 12) are built using the (ancient) base system GCC 4.2.1. The comments in this file apply to ports built using that compiler. If you are using e.g. 11-STABLE or 12-STABLE, this page is for you. If you are using 13-STABLE or 14-CURRENT, this page does not apply.

The status of ports built with clang is different.

Almost all ports do build via gcc. Pre-built packages are available for 12.1R via the usual methods. Only the quarterly branch is built for 12.1R.

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.

• The development ports (pkg, poudriere, rsync, screen, etc.) are well-tested.
• The production versions of gcc* and llvm* are known to work.
• X11 works. There are atcive patches to fix the color problems seen on big-endian.

You may use either drm-legacy-kmod or drm-current-kmod.

• twm and xfce4 work.
• otter-browser works until you hit javascript (segfaults). (There is something broken in qt5-webkit.)
• libreoffice is believed believed to work.

• Most of the server-class ports build.
• lxde, lumina, and mate build.
• gnome3 and gnome3-lite build.

• none currently

• see ports for the list of failures common to both compilers.