Will it build?

While I will always be big-endian at heart, ppc64le does get around a lot of the unfortunately pervasive endian assumptions in a cold blackboxed x86_64 world, and even things like MMX, SSE and SSSE3 can be automatically translated in many cases. It is therefore a happy result that even many software packages completely unaware of ppc64le will still build and function out of the box, assuming they don't do silly things like emit JITted x86_64 assembly code and try to run it, etc.

I ran across this project the other day which has over 1,000 build scripts for ppc64le (as shell scripts and/or Docker files) that you can either use directly, or as a hint whether your intended build will even work. Cursorily paging through a few I see IBM E-mail addresses, so no surprise much of it is tested on Red Hat (though largely RHEL 7.x), but there are also Ubuntu scripts there as well and I imagine they'd accept other distros. Keep in mind that this is generic ppc64le, so it would work on POWER8 and up but any special optimizations (for example, I always build optimized Firefox at -O3 -mcpu=power9), and the concentration more favours server-side packages than workstation and client software. I also see relatively few platform-specific corrections, which could be both good (they weren't needed) or bad (they weren't tested). Still, it's nice to see more resources to aid porting and platform compatibility and that can only in turn get more packages thinking about making ppc64le (and hopefully ppc64) a first-class citizen too.