GNU Guix 1.3

As previously promised, support for POWER9 is now officially a part of the newly released Guix 1.3. Besides many performance and functionality improvements allowing you to Scheme your way to a full installation (or roll back one), the OpenPOWER port should run on any POWER9 PowerNV system (no word on POWER8 support currently, although the support is for generic powerpc64le). Note that as many binary substitutes aren't yet built for POWER9, support is still considered a "technology preview" and you will need to build many of the packages from source for the time being. It is expected this support will catch up as more build capacity comes online.

The only disappointing thing about this announcement is that there doesn't appear to be a way to install standalone Guix (i.e., Guix System) on OpenPOWER yet, nor are there any ISO images you can just pop in your workstation; you'll need to install some other bootable foreign distro and install Guix-the-package-manager on top of it. Presumably Debian, Fedora, Void and others will be suitable, but a full from-scratch install option will be needed to bring this port fully up to parity.