Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2026 21:01:46 -0800 From: Adrian Chadd <adrian@freebsd.org> To: Minsoo Choo <minsoochoo0122@proton.me> Cc: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>, "freebsd-arch@freebsd.org" <arch@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: What's the plan for powerpc64 in FreeBSD 16 Message-ID: <CAJ-VmomG1jxqQ8Wj%2BX8ivz-i6J%2BMDMCNGoAC5aL%2B8bP1Zu4HVg@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <ioNyRWJrBfjQetnvQQZDrd7PuRbSBvmSqNZF6YSaWg7jgBMMtGOeDNPqTuJESTl9wxJDyFfEOcvgvEBHueZodcvi2qQXshCdkDZSfiz9g9M=@proton.me> References: <CANCZdfrQthqYeGYD_9LRcH94JJZuF2%2BUxAqf7Lcoe6p5VzJf9g@mail.gmail.com> <ioNyRWJrBfjQetnvQQZDrd7PuRbSBvmSqNZF6YSaWg7jgBMMtGOeDNPqTuJESTl9wxJDyFfEOcvgvEBHueZodcvi2qQXshCdkDZSfiz9g9M=@proton.me>
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On Mon, 9 Feb 2026 at 16:45, Minsoo Choo <minsoochoo0122@proton.me> wrote: > > I've been working on LLDB for several weeks now. One thing I learned: we should never expect improvement in ppc64be support for LLVM (at least in LLDB). ppc64be POSIX userland debugging on LLDB is incomplete—it's missing files that even riscv and loongarch implement and VSX registers are completely absent in some cases while ppc64le debugging is still actively developed and maintained. Debugging is one of the most crucial component in software development while LLVM is FreeBSD's default toolchain. In this context, I don't see any reason to keep support ppc64be. I was going to implement LLDB userland and kernel debugging support for all supported architectures from FreeBSD 14, but after I examined the current status of ppc64be in LLDB, I decided to abandon it. > > And this is industry trend. The only ppc manufacturer for POSIX platforms, IBM, has been moving away from ppc64be. Major Linux distros, including developed by IBM subsidiary RedHat, only offer ppc64le binaries (RedHat and clones, CentOS, Fedora, SUSE, etc). Many drivers assume that the host is running on little-endian, so those drivers fail to work on big-endian systems. ppc64be is poorly maintained and tested across many OSes and I don't see why we should continue supporting it when there is no benefit. As we've said before, it's a useful big endian test platform, it's cheaply available (qemu boots ppc64 guests just fine) and drivers / infrastructure that isn't big endian clean should just be cleaned up. If there's no support for ppc64be in lldb then we can just mark that as broken and just use gdb for now. I'd also just like to point out that a platform dying a death of a thousand cuts because people don't want to deal with big endian is, well, how a platform like big endian ends up dying. The fact that people are just used to writing little endian intel stuff is why people keep migrating other platforms to it. If you wonder why I bring this up, please also understand that "why bother with FreeBSD" is also an attitude that various other large projects (see: chrome) have towards us. I see the lack of big endian support in a toolchain and debugging tools their problem, not our loss. :-) -adrianhome | help
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