FreeBSD swings both ways

They say there's an xkcd for everything, but me, I say it's Friends GIFs. Anyway, hat tip to developer Piotr Kubaj who reports that, if you don't like big endian and cannot lie, FreeBSD's covered you got with a new little endian ppc64le port to complement the existing (and by now practically mature) big endian ppc64 flavour.

Raptor themselves actually give material support to the project by providing a remote instance for development, powering a build server that continuously runs poudriere bulk -a to test ports. Plus, looking in the source tree, the commits to add little-endian support are all tagged as "Sponsored by: Tag1 Consulting, Inc." This company apparently has OpenPOWER alumni from the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (.pdf). It's nice to see the cross-pollination at work!

Although there are no .iso images yet, they should start appearing with the -CURRENT snapshots next week. Note that official ports support doesn't exist yet either, so you'll need to compile packages on your own for the moment, and there are other minor to moderate deficiencies relative to the big-endian port which are still being rectified. Still, choice is a good thing, especially since per Piotr there are no plans to decommission the big-endian port and both will coexist. How's that for playing on both teams?