Void Linux, a rolling release distribution we covered before that is known for its XBPS package manager and interesting design decisions, such as using the Runit init system and supporting the Musl C library, recently worked on the improve the POWER CPU architecture support.
Daniel Kolesa, who serves as the primary maintainer of Void Linux’s POWER port, spoke at FOSDEM 2021 earlier this month about their enhancements to IBM POWER / OpenPOWER hardware.
Void Linux for POWER has been working on 32-bit little endian support to complement the existing POWER 64-bit little endian support and already supports POWER 32-bit and 64-bit in big endian mode. Void Linux also carries patches for LibreSSL to provide faster crypto performance on POWER, such as getting Google Chromium on POWER in their archive, supporting Electron applications on POWER and also getting good AMD Radeon graphics driver support running on POWER .
Void Linux on POWER was initially brought to PPC64LE on top of the Raptor Talos II Lite hardware and has seen a lot of work in the years since. There are also OpenJDK Java improvements, various toolchain handling improvements, and more. For those with a POWER system like Raptor Computing Systems’ beautiful libre POWER9 hardware, the latest Void Linux seems quite a contender if they want a good rolling release POWER distribution.
For more details on Void Linux on POWER, see Daniel’s PDF slide show of the virtual FOSDEM conference as well as the WebM / VP9 session recording.