Additional stage downloads for amd64, ppc, x86, arm available
Jul 20, 2021

Following some technical reorganization and the introduction of new hardware, the Gentoo Release Engineering team is happy to offer a much-expanded set of stage files for download. Highlights are in particular the inclusion of musl-based stages and of POWER9-optimized ppc64 downloads, as well as additional systemd-based variants for many architectures.

For amd64, Hardened/SELinux stages are now available directly from the download page, as are stages based on the lightweight C standard library musl. Note that musl requires using the musl overlay, as described on the page of the Hardened musl project.

For ppc, little-endian stages optimized for the POWER9 CPU series have been added, as have been big- and little-endian Hardened musl downloads.

Additionally, for all of amd64, ppc64, x86, and arm, stages are now available in both an OpenRC and a systemd init system / service manager variant wherever that makes sense.

This all has become possible via the introduction of new build hosts. The amd64, x86 (natively), arm (via QEMU), and riscv (via QEMU) archives are built on an AMD Ryzen™ 7 3700X 8-core machine with 64GByte of RAM, located in Hetzner’s Helsinki datacentre. The ppc, ppc64, and ppc64le / power9le builds are handled by two 16-core POWER9 machines with 32GByte of RAM, provided by OSUOSL POWER Development Hosting.

Further, at the moment an arm64 (aka aarch64) machine with an 80-core Ampere Altra CPU and 256GByte of RAM, provided by Equinix through the Works On Arm program, is being prepared for improved native arm64 and arm support, so expect updates there soon!