How to build 32-bit application on powerpc64(target:power8) system?

[maxschmidt (Maximillian Schmidt)]

As a couple points of proof, here’s the output from an Openstack instance I just spun up:

[centos@test-centos79 ~]$ cat /etc/os-release && cat /etc/redhat-release && echo -e "\n###################################\n" && lscpu
NAME="CentOS Linux"
VERSION="7 (AltArch)"
ID="centos"
ID_LIKE="rhel fedora"
VERSION_ID="7"
PRETTY_NAME="CentOS Linux 7 (AltArch)"
ANSI_COLOR="0;31"
CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:centos:centos:7:server"
HOME_URL="https://www.centos.org/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.centos.org/"

CENTOS_MANTISBT_PROJECT="CentOS-7"
CENTOS_MANTISBT_PROJECT_VERSION="7"
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT="centos"
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT_VERSION="7"

CentOS Linux release 7.9.2009 (AltArch)

###################################

Architecture:          ppc64le
Byte Order:            Little Endian
CPU(s):                8
On-line CPU(s) list:   0-7
Thread(s) per core:    1
Core(s) per socket:    8
Socket(s):             1
NUMA node(s):          1
Model:                 2.3 (pvr 004e 1203)
Model name:            POWER9 (architected), altivec supported
Hypervisor vendor:     KVM
Virtualization type:   para
L1d cache:             32K
L1i cache:             32K
NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0-7

And what I could download for RHEL 7.9:

So it appears CentOS 7.9, based on RHEL 7, does not only support BE on ppc.

[bergner (Peter Bergner)]

@ramereth

This is false. CentOS 7.x supported both ppc64 and ppc64le.

Color me surprised. I guess after the initial release which was big-endian, they added a little-endian release too. In that case, my other point is what matters:

@bergner

… and are really on a little-endian distro (Use “uname -m” to find out), then you are out of luck with respect to 32-bit binary support. It’s not a technical limitation, but a distro and toolchain limitation, as no one has ever built 32-bit little-endian binaries or libraries on powerpc64le and even if you managed to do that, it has never (AFAIK) been tested to execute a powerpcle binary on the powerpc64le kernel. It could just go boom as far as I know.

[munroesj52 (Steven Munroe)]

Guys, I think we need a little more context.

Are we talking Server (POWER) or embedded (’, ‘’, ‘’, ‘’, ‘’, …).

There may be a Little-Endian 32-bit SDK (cross compiler) for embedded processor development. These are usually one-off packages, specific to an embedded board.

But with the switch to Little-endian 64-bit for Server Class (POWER8) hardware and Distros, there was no plan to support Little-endian 32-bit (programs/libraries) within the Powerpc64le environment.

So please share why this program has to be 32-bit and why it has to run on a server class machine.