Google Chrome/Chromium Begins Landing POWER PPC64LE Patches

Raptor Computing Systems spent a lot of time last year working on Chrome's PPC64LE support to enable Google's web browser to run on the latest IBM POWER processors. Google was sitting on these patches without any action for months but finally they are beginning to be accepted upstream.

It's been a bit odd with the PPC64LE support for Chrome/Chromium taking so long with Google being a founding member of the OpenPOWER Foundation and also reportedly using some POWER9 CPUs within their data centers. But after this long and drawn out process, progress is finally being made on getting Raptor's patches upstreamed.

Hitting the Git code for Chromium on Monday was the Clang toolchain support for PPC64 but there still are plenty more patches needed. This Raptor Wiki page outlines the patches as well as detailing build instructions for anyone wishing to build their own version of Chromium for running on their Raptor Talos II / Blackbird systems.

This news is exciting and goes to further improve the usability of POWER9 on Linux desktop systems. This news comes while Raptor Computing Systems is also involved in bringing up a Wine port to ideally get Windows applications/games running on their hardware.

Those wishing to check out Raptor's lineup of fully libre yet powerful hardware can do so at RaptorCS.com.